Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology Commons^™

Inferring The Evolution Of A Large Earthquake From Its Acoustic Impacts On The Ionosphere, P. A. Inchin, J. B. Snively, M. D. Zettergren, Y. Kaneko, A. Komjathy

Publications

We investigate the possibility to constrain the evolution of the 2016 M7.8 Kaikoura earthquake evolution based on Global Positioning System signal-derived ionospheric total electron content (TEC) perturbations, that represent plasma responses to infrasonic acoustic waves (IAWs) generated by surface motion. This earthquake exhibited unusual complexity and some first-order aspects of its evolution remain unclear; for example, how and when the Papatea fault (PF) and the corresponding large surface deformation occurred. For various earthquake models, a seismic wave propagation code is used to simulate time-dependent surface deformations, which then excite IAWs in a 3D compressible nonlinear atmospheric model, coupled with a …