Studies of the Correlation Between Ionospheric Anomalies and Seismic Activities in the Indian Subcontinent

The VLF (Very Low Frequency) signals are long thought to give away important information about the Lithosphere-Ionosphere coupling. It is recently established that the ionosphere may be perturbed due to seismic activities. The effects of this perturbation can be detected through the VLF wave amplitude. There are several methods to find this correlations and these methods can be used for the prediction of these seismic events. In this paper, first we present a brief history of the use of VLF propagation method for the study of seismo-ionospheric correlations. Then we present different methods proposed by us to find out the seismo-ionospheric correlations. At the Indian Centre for Space Physics, Kolkata we have been monitoring the VTX station at Vijayanarayanam from 2002. In the initial stage, we received 17 kHz signal and latter we received 18.2 kHz signal. In this paper, first we present the results for the 17 kHz signal during Sumatra earthquake in 2004 obtained from the terminator time analysis method. Then we present much detailed and statistical analysis using some new methods and present the results for 18.2 kHz signal. In order to establish the correlation between the ionospheric activities and the earthquakes, we need to understand what are the reference signals throughout the year. We present the result of the sunrise and sunset terminators for the 18.2 kHz signal as a function of the day of the year for a period of four years, viz, 2005 to 2008 when the solar activity was very low. In this case, the signal would primarily be affected by the Sun due to normal sunrise and sunset effects. Any deviation from this standardized calibration curve would point to influences by terrestrial (such as earthquakes) and extra-terrestrial (such as solar activities and other high energy phenomena). We present examples of deviations which occur in a period of sixteen months and show that the correlations with seismic events is significant and typically the highest deviation in terminator shift takes place up to a couple of days prior to the seismic event. We introduce a new method where we find the effects of the seismic activities on D-layer preparation time (DLPT) and the D-layer disappearance time (DLDT). We identify those days in which DLPT and DLDT exhibit deviations from the average value and we correlate those days with seismic events. Separately, we compute the energy release by the earthquakes and using this, we compute the total energy released locally fr