Data Processing Explorations of Ionospheric Signatures from the August 24th, 2016 Central Italy Earthquake

We explore a set of data processing techniques to visualize ionospheric phenomena during the August 24th, 2016 Central Italy Earthquake. The initial data set was drawn from MIT Haystack Observatory's database of global position system (GPS) total electron content (TEC) measurements and subsequently pruned to focus on the epicenter of the earthquake at 42.706°N, 13.223°E using a geographic window of 2 degrees in latitude and longitude. This area included 462 GPS stations within the geographic region for the day of the earthquake, and over 400 stations for the preceding and following days. Each satellite-station pair made a measurement of the line-of-sight TEC once every 30 s, which is processed to yield the 350 km altitude pierce point vertical TEC measurement. We explore different interpolation approaches and density models to highlight potentially visible features within the data points using both the TEC measurements and band-pass filtered TEC (time-differential TEC, dTEC) values. These explorations provide additional insight for ongoing research on ionospheric signatures associated with earthquakes and other environmental responses. Further studies and complementary observations will be needed to provide a better picture of underlying phenomena and to advance our understanding of their dynamic nature. We acknowledge support from NSF ACI-1442997 (PI Pankratius).