by Sanchit Minocha and Imtiyaz A. Parvez
Abstract
The Gorkha Earthquake that occurred on 25th April 2015 was a long anticipated, low angle thrust-faulting shallow event in Central Nepal that devastated the mountainous southern rim of the High Himalayan range. The earthquake was felt throughout central and eastern Nepal, much of the Ganges River plain in northern India, and northwestern Bangladesh, as well as in the southern parts of the Plateau of Tibet and western Bhutan. Two large aftershocks, with magnitudes 6.6 and 6.7, occurred in the region within one day of the main event, and several dozen smaller aftershocks occurred in the region during the succeeding days. In this study, we have analyzed the 350 aftershocks of the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake of Mw 7.8 to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of b-value and the fractal correlation dimension. The b-value is found to be 0.833 ± 0.035 from the Gutenberg-Richter relation by the least squares method and 0.95 ± 0.05 by the maximum likelihood method, indicating high stress bearing source zone. The spatial and temporal correlation dimension is estimated to be 1.07 ± 0.028 and 0.395 ± 0.0027 respectively. Spatial correlation dimension suggests a heterogeneous distribution of earthquake epicenters over a linear structure in space, while the temporal correlation dimension suggests clustering of aftershock activity in the time domain. The spatial variation of the b-value reveals that the b-value is high in the vicinity of the mainshock which is due to the sudden release of stress energy in the form of seismic waves. The spatial distribution of correlation dimension further confirms a linear source in the source zone as it varies from 0.8-1.0 in most of the region. We have also studied the temporal variation of b-value and correlation dimension that shows positive correlation for about first 15 days, then a negative correlation for next 45 days and after that, a positive correlation. The positive correlation suggests that the probability of large magnitude earthquakes decreases in response to increased fragmentation of the fault zone. The negative correlation means that there is a considerable probability of occurrences of large magnitude earthquakes, indicating stress release along the faults of a larger surface area [1]. The correlation coefficient between b-value and the correlation dimension is estimated to be 0.26, which shows that there is no significant relation between them.
source: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=102420
by K.Shimna and M. Sithartha Muthu Vijayan
Abstract
Ionospheric disturbance (ID) detected using GPS based Total Electron Content (TEC) measurements are widely used to study the morphology and dynamics of the ionosphere, and its impact on radio communication and satellite based navigation. The IDs normally derived as rate of change of TEC (ROT) between consecutive ionospheric pierce points at uniform time interval implicitly results in non-uniform spatial sampling along the GPS satellite tracks. The non-uniform spatial sampling introduces aliasing in ROT. These aliasing corrupt amplitude and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of the detected IDs. In this study, we propose a Spatio-Periodic Leveling Algorithm (SPLA) to remove such aliasing. Efficiency of the proposed algorithm was tested by simulating the IDs along a satellite track and validated with GPS observations carried out during 2015 St. Patrick's day geomagnetic storm. Spatiotemporal, and SNR analyses of simulated and observed IDs reveal that the SPLA is (i) efficient in removing the aliases, (ii) increases the SNR on an average of 99.5% compared to ROT, (iii) removes the need of applying elevation cut-off, and (iv) expands the area of coverage up to 65%.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364682620302091?via%3Dihub