Research on Earthquake Precursor in E-TEC: A Study on Land Surface Thermal Anomalies Using MODIS LST Product in Taiwan

Abstract:

Taiwan has been known as an excellent natural laboratory characterized by rapid active tectonic rate and high dense seismicity. The Eastern Taiwan Earthquake Research Center (E-TEC) is established on 2013/09/24 in National Dong Hwa University and collaborates with Central Weather Bureau (CWB), National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE), National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction (NCDR), Institute of Earth Science of Academia Sinica (IES, AS) and other institutions (NCU, NTU, CCU) and aims to provide an integrated platform for researchers to conduct the new advances on earthquake precursors and early warning for seismic disaster prevention in the eastern Taiwan, as frequent temblors are most common in the East Taiwan rift valley. E-TEC intends to integrate the multi-disciplinary observations and is equipped with stations to monitor a wide array of factors of quake precursors, including seismicity, GPS, strain-meter, ground water, geochemistry, gravity, electromagnetic, ionospheric density, thermal infrared remote sensing, gamma radiation etc, and will maximize the value of the data for researches with the range of monitoring equipment that enable to predict where and when the next devastated earthquake will strike Taiwan and develop reliable earthquake prediction models. A preliminary study on earthquake precursor using monthly Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Land Surface Temperature (LST) data before 2013/03/27 Mw6.2 Nantou earthquake in Taiwan is presented. Using the statistical analysis, the result shows the peak of the anomalous LST that exceeds a standard deviation of LST appeared on 2013/03/09 and became less or none anomalies observed on 2013/03/16 before the main-shock, which is in consist with the phenomenon observed by other researchers. This preliminary experimental result shows that the thermal anomalies reveal the possibility to associate surface thermal phenomena before the strong earthquakes.