Taiwanese researcher Wu Hung-chun (吳鴻鈞) appears to have discovered a correlation between atmospheric jet streams and seismic activity, according to research published in February in Research in Geophysics, a peer-reviewed open journal.
Wu is a researcher at the Institute of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health and originally specialized in factory explosions.
He began his current research after establishing a correlation between seismic tremors caused by explosions and air currents, despite others saying that seismic activity lacked a direct connection to atmospheric conditions.
Wu said he first observed the correlation between jet streams and seismic activity in 1997, adding that he had observed abnormal jet stream activity over Japan on March 7, 2011, less than 10km away from the epicenter of the March 11 Tohoku earthquake.
Wu said he used satellite information from the University of San Francisco and worked with Ivan Tikhonov of the Russian Academy of Sciences Far Eastern branch, based in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia. Wu also posted his findings on CNN’s iReport blogging Web site.
He said he used the US school’s satellite data because Taiwan observes jet streams only from November to May each year.
He added that the 921 Earthquake in 1999 occurred outside that time period. Having lost friends then, Wu said he was sad that he could not have been of more help.
From 2006 to 2010, Wu counted more than 58 seismic events in China and Russia that were above magnitude 6 on the Richter scale, including the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and found that jet streams near the epicenter would ascend or descend before the temblors.
Other occurrences include a magnitude 6.1 earthquake in Italy in March 2012, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Iran in April last year and a magnitude 6.6 earthquake in Russia in November last year.
The anomalies continued for six to 12 hours, and occurred within 100km of the epicenter, Wu said. He established the average distance to be about 39km, he said, adding that there was a 66.1 percent chance of an earthquake occurring within 30 days of the atmospheric changes and 100 percent chance of a quake within 70 days.
The altitude changes are shown as gaps or the intersection of changes in wind velocity in satellite images, and are usually above the tremors epicenter, Wu said.
Jet stream wind velocities can exceed 30m per second, Wu added, and the air currents can stretch for thousands of kilometers.
The front ends of jet streams are usually bordered by storms or wind fronts, he said, adding that airlines use jet streams to cut fuel costs and flight times.
Institute director Lin San-gui (林三貴) said that the findings were going to be far-reaching in their impact on disaster prevention.
“We hope that through international cooperation, we can receive more accurate data and turn out more authoritative results,” Lin said.
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