An early warning system for coastal earthquakes

Earthquakes are very common natural hazards, and every year a few damaging events occur throughout the globe. Satellite remote sensing data are found to be useful in providing information about changes in land, ocean, atmosphere and ionosphere. Recent studies have shown that some of the parameters observed from the remote sensing data are associated with impending coastal earthquakes. An automatic system “CQuake” has been developed to carry out spatial and temporal data mining analysis in real time. CQuake performs retrospective analysis of earthquakes, and performs forecast for predefined regions of the world based on the analysis of Surface latent heat flux (SLHF) or any other geophysical parameters. Details of CQuake, and an example of the Colima earthquake of January 22, 2003, are discussed.