Seismo-traveling ionospheric disturbances of earthquake and tsunami waves observed by space- and ground-based GPS receivers

Abstract:

FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC (F3/C) is a constellation of six microsatellites launched on April 15, 2006 and has been orbiting with 72° inclination at 700 to 800 km above the earth since December 2007. The main payload of the F3/C is the GPS Occultation eXperiment (GOX) which carries out probing the radio occultation (RO) total electron content between GPS satellite and F3/C. Therefore, F3/C provides us an excellent opportunity to vertically scan ionospheric electron density from 100 up to 800 km altitude. On the other hand, worldwide ground-based GPS receivers can be employed to observe traveling ionospheric disturbances of the TEC. Here, we present the ionosphere response to seismic and tsunami waves by means of F3/C RO TEC and worldwide ground-based GPS TEC as well as existing data of infrasondes, magnetometers, and Doppler sounding systems during the 11 March 2011 M9.0 Tohoku earthquake.