Relationships between Climatic Variables and Earthquake Events, Finding a Sustainable Way in the Earthquake Prediction

Dear Colleagues,

Recent theoretical and experimental studies on earthquake prediction have been carried out using different methods in different fields. Concerning climate-associated variables of upcoming earthquakes, there are several lists of precursors, including air ionization, radon migration, latent heat release, changes in atmospheric electricity, thermodynamic processes leading to outgoing long-wave radiation, changes in surface air temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, earthquake cloud formation, coupling with precipitation anomalies, ionosphere and magnetosphere effects, radio wave propagation and the generation of electromagnetic emissions (Daneshvar et al. 2015). However, a broader evaluation of climatic anomalies before major seismic events has revealed that pre-seismic signals are widely distributed in the spatial and temporal domains (e.g., Daneshvar and Freund (2017), Pulinets et al. (2018), Ouzounov et al. (2018), Shah and Jin (2018), Daneshvar and Freund (2019), Tariq et al. (2019), Shah et al. (2020), Şentürk et al. (2020) and Daneshvar and Freund (2021)). For instance, during thunderstorm activity, sudden and anomalous heavy precipitation rates have been commonly observed, having been investigated as an indicator of impending earthquake activity (e.g., Daneshvar et al. (2014a), Daneshvar et al. (2014b), Daneshvar et al. (2015) and Daneshvar et al. (2021)). The best reasons for the detection of the physical mechanism of the mentioned relationships between climatic variables and earthquake events could refer to the novel theory of the stress activation of peroxy defects in rocks and the appearance of positive hole charge carriers at the ground-to-air interface (Freund and Freund (2015) and Scoville et al. (2015)), describing the coupling model between the lithosphere and atmosphere/ionosphere layers in seismically active regions (Freund et al. (2009), Freund (2013) and Freund et al. (2021)).

In this Special Issue, we anticipate the proposal of new research findings in response to the principal calls in the recent literature, and the interpretation of the potential basis and datasets through the global earthquake forecasting system (GEFS) (Mignan et al. (2021) and Daneshvar and Freund (2021)). On this basis, the below research topics can be included:

• New statistical, spatial and temporal methods in the research for climatic anomalies before earthquakes;
• Classifying the climatic variables for earthquake perdition;
• Ground-based data analysis for the earthquake forecasting system;
• Earthquake precursory analysis using satellite imageries;
• Exploration of sustainable ways to use the earthquake forecasting system in environmental management and planning;
• Correlation analysis between climate change, environmental degradation and earthquake events;
• Development of new qualitative and quantitative facts regarding the mechanism and modeling of the seismic–climatic coupling.

The aforementioned topics are some examples, and other emerging multidisciplinary efforts are also appreciated. Following the above context, we invite you to submit original research, technical reports, letters or review papers.

Dr. Mohammad Reza Mansouri Daneshvar
Guest Editor

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• earthquake prediction
• climatic variables
• precursory analysis
• earthquake forecasting system
• lithosphere–atmosphere/ionosphere coupling model