Abstract
Thermal anomaly is one of the earthquake precursor in the earthquake preparatory phase. Remote sensing in thermal region has been employed based on the concept of stress accumulation in the active plate tectonics region, which may be transformed as temperature variation prior to earthquake. MODIS Land Surface Temperature has been commonly used to locate the thermal anomalies before the earthquake. Recently researches have been focusing on moderate or large magnitude earthquake events. In Thailand, small earthquake can severely damage the unprepared area. This study, the daily day- and nighttime data of MODIS MOD11A1 product for 30 days before and 15 days after the earthquake on April 22, 2007, in Wiang Pa Pao District, Chiang Rai Province, Thailand, were processed and analysed to locate possibility of thermal anomalies. Thermal anomalies before and after the earthquakes were detected using the comparative method. The result found that the thermal anomaly temperature could be high up to 4.1 - 10.9 C which occurred in 21 - 22 days prior to the earthquake. Therefore, it may conclude that small earthquake can also release energy as the detectable thermal anomaly. However, more study about the relationship between thermal precursor and earthquake is needed to continue.
Highlights
Earthquake prediction studies which are based on disastrous natural phenomenon correlated to the Earth’s deformation, surface temperature growth, gas and aerosol exhalation, and electromagnetic disturbances in the ionosphere are more attended [1]
Thermal anomaly precursor has been attracted more in the earthquake prediction as it can be observed from the thermal remote sensors
During the time period between April 6 - April 20, 2007, the surface thermal anomaly was unable to analyze because most satellite images were covered by the clouds
Summary
Earthquake prediction studies which are based on disastrous natural phenomenon correlated to the Earth’s deformation, surface temperature growth, gas and aerosol exhalation, and electromagnetic disturbances in the ionosphere are more attended [1]. Thermal anomaly precursor has been attracted more in the earthquake prediction as it can be observed from the thermal remote sensors. Many reports depicted the appearence of the land surface temperature (LST) anomalies prior to strong earthquakes [2,3,4,5,6,7]. In many areas such as Middle Asia, Iran, China, Turkey, Japan, Kamchatka, India, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Spain and Thailand, the earthquake thermal anomalies have been studied on the earthquake with magnitude greater than 4.5 [1, 7]. Many studies have found that the thermal remote sensors can detect the thermal anomalies from seismic activities [3, 4, 6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
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