Diagnosis Of Soil Moisture And Cloud Anomalies Before Earthquakes Using Remote Sensing

The role of soil moisture on environmental health and human life quality is inevitable.There are comprehensive researches about soil moisture and its effect on the hydrological cycle,irrigation management,climate change,weather forecasts,and environmental observations such as drought monitoring.Although the application of soil moisture is studied in widespread,however,few studies have focused on the influence of earthquakes on the surface and underground soil moisture due.Cao Chun Xiang et al.have proposed a new theory of diagnosis of environmental health by remote sensing that suggests four main application of remote sensing diagnosis as “atmospheric condition,water health,human health,the impact of disaster” as the main categories.In this research,we have proved that diagnosis of soil moisture by remote sensing can be employed on the earthquake precursory researches that support environmental health diagnosis by remote sensing theory.Earthquakes are destructive natural disasters,which can cause serious damage,death and economic losses in densely populated areas.Therefore,any methods that mitigate the impact of earthquakes on human life is the interest of society.Soil moisture can be nominated as a candidate for earthquake precursory researches.Because there are reports about groundwater level variations and underground heat production due to the frictions that influence the soil moisture.In this research,we have used remote sensing technologies as well as meteorological data to investigate the possible correlation of earthquakes with surface and underground soil moisture and clouds as a consequence of soil moisture evaporation.Researches were conducted in three section and results were very promising that can improve the state of art in the field.Firstly,surface soil moisture ascending product from SMOS satellite,daily precipitation and day and nighttime MODIS Land Surface Temperature(LST)product were used to investigate soil moisture and thermal infrared anomalies in case of the 7.3 magnitudes(Mw)earthquake of 2017 in Kermanshah,Iran.The spatiotemporal anomalies of soil moisture and land surface temperature near active faults were found just one day before the main shock.Anomalous area's extent has a high correlation with the earthquakes happened afterward in the region until the end of 2018.Secondly,meteorological data such as solar radiation,precipitation,soil moisture,air temperature and temperature at different underground depths were investigated and some sorts of the anomalous pattern were found in the temporal analysis.Anomalies were more considerable in air and surface temperature.It is observed that solar radiations and precipitation effect on soil moisture and temperature variations from near surface to the underground is significant.Correlation maps revealed a high correlation between the air to deep temperatures while the correlation of soil moisture from the surface to deep level is not significant.However,soil moisture variations in deep levels did not show a significant correlation with the earthquake.Thirdly,seismic clouds were studied in the case of Iran 7.3 Mw 2017 earthquake and subsequently,a broader area from west of Turkey to the middle of China for a time range of December 2018 to February 2019 for earthquakes greater than 4 Mw were investigated.Geostationary METEOSAT-8 Thermal Infrared(TIR)10.8 ?m band have used for clouds time series analysis.During the analysis,we found a new repetitive pattern that never was reported by other researchers.Based on the new pattern and features found by other researchers,we detected 60 successful seismic clouds out of 85 earthquakes.Using Template Matching technique,a new pattern was used as a reference template and the results were very promising that can be used in seismic clouds detection researches.The results demonstrate that the method has a good application prospect in seismic cloud identification.Finally,the innovations and findings of this research include 1)satellite-derived Surface soil moisture can be introduced as a novel possible precursor to high magnitude earthquakes.2)To the knowledge of us,Earthquake-related Analysis of temperature and soil moisture in different underground depths was not conducted in prior researches.3)Introducing a new cloud pattern as a new feature in seismic cloud analysis 4)the application of template matching is evaluated using new seismic cloud pattern that can improve future seismic clouds analysis.