Do Earthquakes cause Propagation dropouts? Can the RF-Seismograph see earthqakes?

Hi Everybody;

We have just got confirmation that the RF-Seismograph has picked up another 3 earthquakes about 200km of the north end of Vancouver island at 16:19PST.

The same pattern of disrupted communication is detected by the RF-Seismograph (see image below).

All the best;

Alex – VE7DXW

 

Without having data to prove this, I would imagine the Moon plays an important role in the Earth's seismic activity. We already know the enormous effect of the Moon to lift many cubic miles of water in the tidal cycles. It would stand to reason that this same effect is applied to land masses and tectonic plates as they slide along the Earth's molten core. At some point all this repeated force on a tectonic plate is going to be just enough nudge to break it lose. Then changes or slight deformations in the molten core would have some relation to changing magnetic lines of force around the Earth thus a change in RF propagation. Just a theory.

 

And very plausible theory indeed.
Somehow directly relating mechanical events . such as earthquake, to effect electrical events seems far fetched.
In my opinion / view , amateur radio enthusiasts have an opportunity to have better knowledge / understanding of electrical and magnetic behavior then an average Joe.
Let's use it.

73 Shirley

 

I just spent some time reading a few journal papers about this topic.

The problem that researchers in this area are having is similar to the problems with the OP’s data - defining the ionospheric earthquake precursor events and distinguishing them from those routinely caused by many other forcing mechanisms unrelated to earthquakes. In other words, finding the needle in the haystack of the notoriously variable ionosphere.

Many more metrics than the OP’s noise and signals on an HF band are used, such as satellite data on electron density, ion density, ion species, current between earth and ionosphere, magnetometer data, GPS propagation data, etc. The location and extent of these over the earth are also examined and compared to the location of earthquakes, in addition to time correlation.

There are some plausible explanations for earthbound effects rising to affect the ionosphere, if they are really caused by earthquakes. These include acoustic waves, gravity waves, electric field changes, ion generation affecting “fair weather current”, VLF and ELF EM waves, and others.

Yet there is still nothing definitive as of now, and correlation, much less causation, remains elusive. Much more data needs to be gathered and there are plans to launch more satellites to specifically look for some ionospheric signature.

 

Does a magnet moving through a coil of wire count? Is that effect 'far fetched' ?

Moving billions and billions of tons of molten iron in a magnetic field is expected to have no effect?

 

When you have a defined list of events such as a listing of earthquakes as released by the USGS you can locate each event. That is exactly what we have done.
We have collected over 102MB of data and it is a "haystack", but when you have exact data and time you can find the needle!
Alex - VE7DXW

 

There is a lot more going on than just mechanical mass movement. Even if only the mass moves the shock-waves created by the event will cause a disruption of the ionosphere!
According to the latest science there is a buildup of static electricity caused by the piezo-electric effect of the material that is about to break.
Alex-VE7DXW

 

I think that all you’ve done is generate a false “correlation” with the benefit of hindsight by only considering those times when an earthquake occurred. You also need to account for all the times that you observed a propagation anomaly (after you define it rigorously) when an earthquake did NOT occur.

I believe you need to study up on how to correctly calculate correlation (and perform statistical tests generally) betweeen two time series.

 

I am sorry but you seem to suggest to look for keys in the attic and not in the kitchen where you left them. Makes no sense to me!
Alex

 

Suppose I have a pager that beeps every time a significant earthquake is detected. And suppose that every time my pager beeps, I turn on my AM broadcast station to a local station and listen. Perhaps I observe that 95 percent of the time, within five minutes of an earthquake being detected, the radio station plays an annoying commercial.

Have I discovered something significant? Probably just that the radio station plays annoying commercials frequently enough that if I turn the radio on randomly, there's a 95 percent chance of being annoyed within five minutes.

And yet you seem to be suggesting that we should only listen around the times of earthquakes, never investigating whether the phenomenon happens at other times.

 

Ok, consider this similar example.

Suppose you want to see if telepathy really exists. So you decide to take many random times each day for a week and think hard about asking your friend to call you on the phone. So you get two time series, one of each time you thought about the call, and one showing when your friend actually called.

You compare the time series, and there are a couple of times when your friend called right after one of those thought sessions. Does that prove a telepathic connection?

No, of course not, because you must also consider all the times he did NOT call right after a thought session. In other words, you need to show that it wasn’t just by chance (or some other reason) that he called at that particular time.

There are proven well known statistical methods for doing that type of analysis.

 

Absolutely not! Our RF-Seismograph runs and records data around the clock. We have continues propagation data starting at Aug 2016 and counting.
Once the data is recorded you look up when the earthquake occurred and call up that day and look if there are any changes in the noise level (propagation). This is how we found this connection! This is how we concluded that earthquakes do create a small RF signal on 80m. We have taken 170 M6+ events and matched the times to our data.
We found that 80% of the quakes we looked at had an RF signal attached to it. Our noise level at 80m is about S5 to S7 and the additional noise adds about 1 S level to the noise we already are receiving.
It is quite visible but I have not recorded the actual noise the radio makes. It is quite subtle.

Alex

 

The time s of the earthquakes are precisely defined by USGS, because we look at it after fact.
Alex

 

You don't even know what a key (propagation event) is. You are just eyeballing squiggles on your graph. Definition, definition, definition.