Observations and simulations of seismoionospheric GPS total electron content anomalies before the 12 January 2010M7 Haiti earthquake

Abstract

[1] In this paper, the total electron content (TEC) of the global ionosphere map (GIM) is used to detect seismoionospheric anomalies associated with the 12 January 2010 M7 Haiti earthquake, and an ionospheric model is applied to simulate the detected anomalies. The GIM temporal variation shows that the TEC over the epicenter significantly enhances on 11 January 2010, 1 day before the earthquake. The latitude-time-TEC (LTT) plots reveal three anomalies: (1) the northern crest of equatorial ionization anomaly (EIA) moves poleward, (2) the TECs at the epicenter and its conjugate increase, and (3) the TECs at two dense bands in the midlatitude ionosphere of 35°N and 60°S further enhance. The spatial analysis demonstrates that the TEC enhancement anomaly appears specifically and persistently in a small region of the northern epicenter area. The simulation well reproduces the three GIM TEC anomalies, which indicate that the dynamoelectric field of the ionospheric plasma fountain might have been perturbed by seismoelectric signals generated around the epicenter during the earthquake preparation period.