The global seismic activity influence on process in atmosphere and ionosphere

Abstract

In recent decades, ideas about earthquakes (EQ) have been formed as a final stage of a planetary continuous self-organizing tectonic process with periods of accumulation and relaxation of tectonic stresses. However, the scientific literature still presents studies of the response of atmospheric and ionospheric processes to individual strong EQs. In this paper, for the first time, the relationship between processes in the lithosphere, troposphere, and ionosphere is considered, taking into account new ideas about the seismic process as a global phenomenon and on the background of processes caused by space weather. Both planetary data (EQ, total electron content (TEC) of the ionosphere) and data (atmospheric pressure, critical frequency of the F2 layer of the ionosphere) of widely spaced observation points in the western and eastern hemispheres were used. To increase the reliability of statistical results, 4 independent databases of daily data for 2007–2015 were used. Stable effects of global seismic activity (GSA) in the considered parameters are established. Thus, the critical frequency of the F2 region with a sharp increase in the GSA increases by 0.4–0.5 MHz. This effect is quite stable and manifests itself almost simultaneously at ionospheric stations of the eastern and western hemispheres, as well as in planetary TEC values. At the same time, in the ionospheric variations, as before, the influence of both the troposphere (especially at a low level of solar activity) and space weather is traced, the characteristics of which in 75 % of cases also show an association with GSA. Therefore, space weather often but not always can act as a trigger on the EQs. In general, in the western hemisphere, the minimum atmospheric pressure occurs earlier than in the eastern, which leads to a noticeable increase in the pressure difference between the hemispheres by 10 mm. Hg., that indicates the relationship between global seismicity and global atmospheric circulation. The established GSA effects, as a rule, have the character of not a local short-term burst, but a jump followed by a gradual decrease (increase) of the index until the next active period (saw-toothed curve), i.e., the influence of the lithosphere on the overlying layers is continuous and is cyclical in nature, probably due to the cyclical nature of tectonic processes. Most likely, several different couplings between geospheres are realized at the same time, partially synchronized by changes in space weather, which requires new physical mechanisms to explain them.