A combined estimator using TEC and b-value for large earthquake prediction

Abstract

Ionospheric anomalies have been shown to occur a few days before several large earthquakes. The published works normally address examples limited in time (a single event or few of them) or space (a particular geographic area), so that a clear method based on these anomalies which consistently yields the place and magnitude of the forthcoming earthquake, anytime and anywhere on earth, has not been presented so far. The current research is aimed at prediction of large earthquakes, that is with magnitude Mw 7 or higher. It uses as data bank all significant earthquakes occurred worldwide in the period from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2018. The first purpose of the research is to improve the use of ionospheric anomalies in the form of TEC grids for earthquake prediction. A space–time TEC variation estimator especially designed for earthquake prediction will show the advantages with respect to the use of simple TEC values. Further, taking advantage of the well-known predictive abilities of the Gutenberg–Richter law’s b-value, a combined estimator based on both TEC anomalies and b-values will be designed and shown to improve prediction performance even more.