Work

Assessing precursory signals with kinematic GNSS: Insights from the 2023 Mw 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Identifying precursors of large earthquakes is critical for minimizing the losses of life and property. Recently, Bletery and Nocquet (2023)captured a ∼2-hour-long exponential acceleration of slip using the high-rate (5-min) Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) time series from the 48 hours before the 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku-oki earthquake, which was obtained by simply concatenating daily kinematic results together. Here, we apply their method to sum the horizontal displacements of 24 high-rate GNSS stations in the direction predicted by fault slip at the hypocenter of the 2023 Mw 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake to characterize its precursory phase. Results demonstrate a several-hour accelerating exponential slip before the mainshock. However, considering that single-day processing would lead to discontinuities at the day boundary, we process the multi-day GNSS data in continuous mode, repeat the experiment, and find that the observed acceleration-like signals vanish. Our work shows that inadequate data processing may lead to the detection of false precursory signals, highlighting the need to develop robust processing techniques in order to identify reliable precursory signals before large earthquakes.

Source: Earthquake research advances

DOI: 10.1016/j.eqrea.2025.100392

Authors: Jingqi Wang, Rumeng Guo, Jianqiao Xu, Heping Sun

Institutions: Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology, CAS, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Language: English

Topic: earthquake and tectonic studies

Subfield: Geophysics

Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $800

Funders: National Natural Science Foundation of China, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province