Earthquake Precursors Assessment in Vrancea Area, Romania, by Satellite and Geophysical In-Situ Data

Earthquake prediction has two potentially compatible but distinctly different objectives: (a) phenomena that provide information about the future earthquake hazard useful to those who live in earthquake-prone regions and (b) phenomena causally related to the physical processes governing failure on a fault that will improve our understanding of those processes. For seismic hazard analysis in Vrancea area, Romania have been selected the earthquake precursors detectable from space which can also be observed by ground-based monitoring experiments: surface deformation provided by GPS and SAR imaging, land surface temperature changes as possible precursors provided by ASTER, Landsat TM and ETM, electromagnetic and ionospheric anomalies, radon gas emissions in the faults areas prior to earthquakes, as well as seismicity. As Vrancea area has a significant regional tectonic activity in Romania and Europe, the joint analysis of geospatial and in-situ geophysical information is revealing new insights in the field of hazard assessment.

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