The PRE-EARTHQUAKES EU-FP7 Project: preliminary results of the PRIME experiment for a Dynamic Assessment Of Seismic Risk (DASR) by multi-parametric observations

Abstract

The appearance of anomalous space-time patterns of geophysical parameters measured from days to week before earthquakes occurrence have been reported by several authors in the past years. However, even in presence of physical models able to justify the observations (Tronin, 1996; Revil and Glover, 1997; Pulinets, 2009), up to now no one single measurable parameter, no one observational methodology has demonstrated to be sufficiently reliable and effective for the implementation of an operational earthquake prediction system (see for example Geller, 1997). The extension of our present observational capabilities and the refinement of data analysis methods could improve our present knowledge of preparatory phases of earthquakes and of their possible precursors. However only from the integration of different observations (parameters) we expect to obtain false alarm rates and precision (in the space-time domain) of the earthquakes predictions useful for a Dynamic Assessment of Seismic Risk (DASR) ranging from the mediumlong up to the short and the very short term. This is also the main goal of PRE-EARTHQUAKES (Processing Russian and European EARTH observations for earthQUAKE precursors Studies) the FP7 Project which, to this aim, committed together, different expertise and observational capabilities, in the last 2 years. In the learning phase, different parameters (e.g., thermal anomalies, total electron content, radon concentration, etc.), measured from ground and satellite systems and analyzed by using different data analysis approaches, have been studied for selected geographic areas and specific seismic events in the past. Since July 2012 the PRIME (PRE-EARTHQUAKES Real-time Integration and Monitoring Experiment) started attempting to perform, on the base of independent observations collected and integrated in real-time through the PEG (PRE-EARTHQUAKES Geo-portal), a Dynamic Assessment of Seismic Risk (DASR) on selected geographic areas of Europe (Italy-Greece-Turkey) and Asia (Kamchatka, Sakhalin, Japan). In this paper, results so far achieved as well as the potential and opportunities they open for a worldwide Earthquake Observation System (EQuOS) - as a dedicated component of GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) - will be presented