A new method to extract and analyze abnormal phenomenon of earthquake from remote sensing information

The satellite remote sensing has become a promising technique for detecting earthquake and fault activities. But the radiation and the reflection of the earth surface detected by remote sensing are influenced not only by earthquake or fault activities but also by many factors such as terrain, vegetation, weather and so on. In order to effectively extract the earthquake anomaly and get rid of the impacts of non-earthquake factors, this paper presented a new method to extract and analyze anomaly caused by earthquakes or fault activities. We applied the method to the data of AMSR-E and MODIS for the earthquake that struck Sichuan, China, on May 12, 2008. As a result, we detected that the thermal infrared (TIR) anomaly information retrieved from MODIS data emerged before the earthquake and the microwave radiation anomaly retrieved from AMSR-E data emerged both before and after the earthquake.