Land surface temperature, tropospheric and ionospheric anomalies analysis and implementation of a co-seismic PWV digital twin for the February 6, 2023 Turkey earthquake

Abstract

A dual powerful earthquake hit Turkey on 6 February 2023 with a magnitude of 7.8. A preliminary geophysical analysis of land surface temperature (LST), tropospheric and ionospheric parameters was carried out. Precipitable water vapor (PWV), derived from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data, increased significantly and peaked over the stations when the earthquake burst. Moreover, total electron content (TEC) surge occurred, with a travelling ionospheric disturbance (TID) spreading from the northeast to the southwest in the south. LST observations from two-temporal scales indicates that a precursory thermal anomaly occurred 3 weeks in advance, and a low-temperature condition during the earthquake. For the period 18–24 January, LST was more than 10 °C higher than that of the past 10 years in the same period. However, a significant low-LST was observed on the days of mainshock from 4–6 February, with the anomaly index at the epicenter being −1.66, −1.82, and −1.80 with descending range of −8.66 °C, −10.05 °C and −9.27 °C, respectively. In terms of algorithms, we introduced different features to construct a digital twin to predict the PWV for 2023 Turkey earthquake, yielding a root mean square error (RMSE) averaging 4.60 mm when compared to GNSS-PWV.