Authors: Mohammad Reza Mansouri Daneshvar Mahmood Khosravi Taghi Tavousi
Publish Date: 2014/06/03
Volume: 74, Issue: 3, Pages: 1539-1553
Abstract
Several studies have reported the increased values of surfacelatent heat flux SLHF and rainfall events prior to the earthquakes as the seismic precursors In order to investigate the variation of two mentioned atmospheric variables we analyzed 39 major earthquakes in the Middle East based on the time series of NASA remote sensing data On this basis we observed that accumulated rainfall and SLHF of about 29 earthquakes were higher than 10 mm and 50 W/m2 respectively ~75 over 3–23 days prior to the main shock of major earthquakes We believed that the records of atmospheric variables are the consequence of a seismictriggered chain including of air ionization surfacelatent heat exhalation water vapor condensation and subordinate rainfall as the atmospheric responses to lithospheric motions This seismic triggering in the Middle East has averagely caused to accumulated rainfall of ~35 mm and maximum SLHF of ~115 W/m2 over the 3–23 days prior to 39 major earthquakes To investigate of spatial correlation between earthquakes and atmospheric variations we clustered 39 major earthquakes in eight seismological regions Then we estimated the moderate and strong correlation R 2 between preceding times of earthquakes with magnitude of major earthquakes and their hypocenter depth equal to 048 and 068 respectively
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