Ionospheric total electron content anomaly possibly associated with the April 4, 2010 Mw7.2 Baja California earthquake

Abstract

• New decomposition and nonlinear fitting method to extract TEC disturbances. • TEC increasing near epicenter on March 25, 2010, 10 days before Mw7.2 Baja California earthquake. • Both data and model show the uniqueness of the TEC enhancement on March 25. Identifying ionospheric disturbances potentially related to an earthquake is a challenging work. Based on the ionospheric total electron content (TEC) data from the madrigal database at the Haystack Observatory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a new decomposition and nonlinear fitting method has been developed and applied in this work to extract the TEC disturbances that are potentially related to the Mw7.2 Baja California earthquake occurred on April 4, 2010. By analyzing the TEC data for a long period of time (72 days) before and after the earthquake, we found that a unique TEC enhancement occurred in the region around the epicenter on March 25. No other significant ionospheric TEC anomalies were identified in the 72-day period around the earthquake, except some TEC disturbances that appeared to be related to the geomagnetic activity between April 1 and 6, 2010. We further analyzed the TEC data from other magnetically quiet days, and no TEC anomaly like that occurred on March 25 was detected. The TEC data calculated from a first principles model SD-WACCM-X were also analyzed using the same method as that for the observational data. No TEC anomaly was found on March 25 from the model outputs either. Thus the source of the TEC anomaly on March 25 is unlikely from the lower atmosphere waves. In this study, we show the occurrence of TEC anomaly on March 25, 10 days before the Mw7.2 Baja California earthquake and this TEC anomaly may not be explained by lower atmosphere or geomagnetic activity forcing.