NHESS Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences NHESS Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 1684-9981 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/nhess-11-1019-2011 Investigation of TEC and VLF space measurements associated to L'Aquila (Italy) earthquakes Stangl G. 1 Boudjada M. Y. 2 Biagi P. F. 3 Krauss S. 2 Maier A. 2 Schwingenschuh K. 2 Al-Haddad E. 4 Parrot M. 5 Voller W. 2 Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying, Vienna, Austria Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria Department of Physics, University of Bari, Bari, Italy Software Engineering, Campus 02, University of Applied Sciences, Graz, Austria Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie de l'Environnement, Orléans, France 01 04 2011 11 4 1019 1024 Copyright: © 2011 G. Stangl et al. 2011 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/11/1019/2011/nhess-11-1019-2011.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/11/1019/2011/nhess-11-1019-2011.pdf

In this study, we report on Total Electron Content (TEC) and Very Low Frequency (VLF) space measurements derived from Global Positioning System (GPS) and DEMETER satellites, respectively. These measurements are associated with the earthquake (EQ) of a magnitude of 6.3, which occurred on 6 April 2009, in L'Aquila (Italy). Anomaly features are derived from the analysis of TEC and VLF observations recorded two weeks before and after the seismic event occurrence. A TEC map with an interpolated regional pixel resolution of 1° × 1° × 15 min in latitude, longitude and time was generated, allowing for the checking of a possible presence of disturbances over the L'Aquila region. This analysis is combined with the study of the time profile associated to the VLF flux density variations recorded by the Instrument Champ Electrique (ICE) experiment on-board DEMETER satellite. We discuss, on the one hand, the combination efficiency of the electronic density and the VLF electromagnetic measurements and, on the other hand, the difficulty to distinguish between global effects and regional ones related to the earthquake.

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