Feasibility study of thermal anomaly detection for earthquake: A case study from 2014 Mae Lao earthquake, Thailand

Abstract

Earthquake is the natural disaster which causes damage to human lives and their properties, domestic animals and buildings in the areas near the epicentre. The ability to predict the earthquake can greatly reduce in catastrophic damages, but nowadays, earthquake prediction is still the unsolvable problem. However, the earthquake prediction is still an interesting topic for scientists all over the world. One of the important earthquakes precursors in earthquake preparatory phase is thermal anomaly. The thermal region data from remote sensing have been employed recently based on the concept of stress accumulation in the active plate tectonics region, which can be transformed as temperature variation prior event. Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Land Surface Temperature (LST) data have been commonly used to locate thermal anomalies prior to occurrence of earthquake event. In Thailand, 2014 Mae Lao Earthquake, the largest earthquake in the Thailand historical record with magnitude Mw 6.1, shook the area of Mae Lao District, Chiang Rai Province on 5th May 2014. To locate possibility of thermal anomalies, the daily data of MODIS MYD11A1 product for 30 days before and after the earthquake were processed and analysed. Average LST before and after earthquake events were used for removing background temperature in the area and comparative method was performed to detect the thermal anomalies. The result found that this simple technique detected the thermal anomaly occurrence during 12-23 days prior to the earthquake and 9-28 days after the earthquake. Nevertheless, in order to understand furthermore about earthquake mechanism, it is necessity of discovered thermal precursors.