Understanding Space Weather influence on earthquake triggering to shield people living in seismic regions

There is an idea at present that space weather can influence not only the technological infrastructure and people's health, but seismic activity as well. Space weather impact on the Earth results from magnetic reconnection between the Sun's and Earth's magnetic fields. The effectiveness of reconnection depends on sign and magnitude of Z-components in solar wind magnetic field and earth's magnetic field as measured in the geocentric solar magnetosphere (GSM) coordinate system. The more negative value of Zgsm in the solar wind magnetic field, and the more positive value of Zgsm in the geomagnetic field, the more solar wind energy penetrates into the earth's environment due to reconnection. It was found recently by Khachikyan et al. [2012, http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijg] that maximal possible earthquake magnitude in a particular seismic region (seismic potential - Mmax) may be determined, in first approximation, on the base of maximal geomagnetic Zgsm value in this region, namely: Mmax = (5.22 +- 0.17) + (0.78 +- 0.06) x [abs (Zgsm)]. In this report we present statistical results on association between variations in space weather and global seismic activity, and demonstrate that a great Sumatra earthquake (M=9.1, on December 26, 2004, at 00:58:53 GMT) indeed occurred in region where the geomagnetic Zgsm components are largest at the globe. In the time of earthquake occurrence, geomagnetic Zgsm value in the epicenter (3.30N, 95.980E) was equal to ~37147 nT. A range of possible maximal magnitude, as estimated from above relation, could be of 8.8 - 9.2. The recorded magnitude M=9.1 is within this range.