Ionospheric disturbances detected by GPS total electron content observation after the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake

By Takuya Tsugawa, Akinori Saito, Yuichi Otsuka, Michi Nishioka, Takashi Maruyama, H. Kato, T. Nagatsuma, Ken T. Murata. 2011

259 citations recorded by the source corpus.

All the details of ionospheric disturbances following the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake were first revealed by the high-resolution GPS total electron content observation in Japan. The initial ionospheric disturbance appeared as sudden depletions following small impulsive TEC enhancements ~7 minutes after the earthquake onset, near the epicenter. Then, concentric waves appeared to propagate in the radial direction with a velocity of 138–3,457 m/s. Zonally-extended enhancements of the TEC also appeared in the west of Japan. In the vicinity of the epicenter, short-period oscillations with a period of ~4 minutes were observed. This paper focuses on the concentric waves. The concentric pattern indicates that they had a point source. The center of these structures, termed the “ionospheric epicenter”, was located about 170 km from the epicenter in the southeast direction. According to the propagation characteristics, these concentric waves could be caused by atmospheric waves classified into three types: acoustic waves generated from a propagating Rayleigh wave, acoustic waves from the ionospheric epicenter, and atmospheric gravity waves from the ionospheric epicenter. The amplitude of the concentric waves was not uniform and was dependent on the azimuth of their propagation direction, which could not be explained by previously-proposed theory.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61d3fffe9becdfad9a43f8be2d4e378720e3149a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Geophysics

Citations in the corpus

Variability and predictability of the space environment as related to lower atmosphere forcing (2016, background): “Observed TIDs have been directly related to wave sources in the lower atmosphere, including deep convection, earthquake, and tsunami [e.g., Tsugawa et al., 2011; Nishioka et al., 2013; Azeem et al., 2015; Huba et al., 2015; Meng et al., 2015].”
GNSS ionospheric seismology: Recent observation evidences and characteristics (2015, methodology): “0) was revealed by abundant GNSS observations collected by GEONET near the epicenter (Liu et al., 2011; Rolland et al., 2011; Tsugawa et al., 2011; Occhipinti et al., 2013; Jin et al., 2014).”
Ionospheric Detection of Natural Hazards (2019, background): “Thus, during large earthquakes, the initial near‐field TEC enhancement is often followed by a significant long‐term depletion (e.g., Kakinami et al., 2012; Saito et al., 2011; Tsugawa et al., 2011).”
From Sumatra 2004 to Tohoku‐Oki 2011: The systematic GPS detection of the ionospheric signature induced by tsunamigenic earthquakes (2013, background): “…and Hashim, 2011]; it also validates once more the ionospheric observations during the tsunami generation at the epicenter [Rolland et al., 2011b; Tsugawa et al., 2011] as well as its propagation in the open ocean where detections are performed not only by GPS but also, for the first time, by…”
Concentric waves and short‐period oscillations observed in the ionosphere after the 2013 Moore EF5 tornado (2013, background): “The high-resolution TEC map over Japan has been used to detect ionospheric structures after great earthquakes [Heki and Ping, 2005; Tsugawa et al., 2011].”