Analysis of the 14 May 2019 Papua New Guinea Mw=7.6 earthquake
On 14 May 2019, a powerful earthquake hit offshore North East of Papua New Guinea island in a region that is characterized by high seismicity due to the convergence of different plate boundaries. Investigations of the status of the ionosphere before the occurrence of this earthquake have been conducted also using new data and techniques, as published in Akhoondzadeh et al., Frontier in Earth Science, 2022. The main finding was the detection of two phases of acceleration in the number of the ionospheric anomalies (after filtering the ones due to external perturbations, such as the solar and geomagnetic activity) that preceded the earthquake occurrence of about 80 days and one month. CSES-01 satellite was fundamental in this study to confirm the detected phenomena and exclude other possible sources. In fact due to its Sun-syncronous orbit, i.e. it flies above any region of the world always at the same local time (2 AM for night and 2 PM for day), it permitted to obtain a stable characterization of the ionospheric parameters as visible in the following figure. Some of the deviations from the standard behaviour, depicted by special labels in the figures are likely to be due to the preparation of such a strong earthquake. Some anomalies occurred during solar perturbed conditions are underlined by an “S” and, for them, a link with the seismic event is unlikely.
