Long term TIR satellite monitoring over Europe, US and Asian Regions: Results and possible implications for an Integrated System for a time-Dependent Assessment of Seismic Hazard (t-DASH)

Space-time fluctuations of Earth's emitted Thermal Infrared (TIR) radiation have been observed by satellite months to weeks before earthquakes occurrence. The general RST (Robust Satellite Techniques) approach has been used (since 2001) in order to discriminate normal (i.e. related to the change of natural factor and/or observation conditions) TIR signal fluctuations from anomalous signal transients possibly associated to earthquake occurrence. Since then several earthquakes occurred all around the world have been studied on the base of decades of satellite observations always using a validation/confutation approach in order to verify the presence/absence of anomalous space-time TIR transients in presence/absence of significant seismic activity. During the PRE-EARTHQUAKES EU-FP7 Project (www.pre-earthquakes.org), a real-time monitoring activity was started by applying RST approach to different geostationary satellite sensors (MSG/SEVIRI over Europe, MTSAT over Asia) systematically analyzing, day by day, TIR anomaly maps in order to identify possible significant (e.g. persistent in the space-time domain) thermal anomalies. In this paper results of two years of day-by-day TIR analysis over some European and Asian Regions will be presented together with results achieved by the analysis of six years of GOES/Imager TIR observations over Southwestern US (2006–2011). Results achieved will be discussed also in relation with anomalous signal transients observed in ionosphere in the perspective of the possible construction of an Integrated System for a time-Dependent Assessment of Seismic Hazard (t-DASH).