A decade of RST applications to seismically active areas monitoring by TIR satellite observations

In order to discriminate normal (i.e. related to the change of natural factor and/or observation conditions) fluctuations of Earth’s emitted Thermal Infrared (TIR) radiation from anomalous transients possibly associated to earthquake occurrence, since 2001 a Robust Satellite Technique (RST; Tramutoli, 1998; 2005; 2007) approach has been applied. After the first tests performed by using TIR sensors on board polar satellites it was quite evident the advantage offered by the use of geostationary platforms in studies like these, which do not require the higher spatial resolution offered by polar sensors but strongly benefit of the reduced “observational noise” (in terms of view angles, ground resolution cells stability and image collection times) guaranteed by geostationary platforms (e.g. Filizzola et al., 2004). Since then, tens of earthquakes occurred in Europe, Asia, Africa and America have been studied by analyzing long terms (up to 10 years and more) time series of TIR images acquired by geostationary satellites (like MFG, MSG, GOES, MTSAT). In all cases a validation/confutation approach was always applied in order to verify the presence/absence of anomalous space-time TIR transients in presence/absence of significant seismic activity. Main achievements in more than 10 years using RST approach for seismic area monitoring will be presented and discussed by comparing results obtained on different earthquakes which happened in different geographic areas and using different satellite sensors.