2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS), Shanghai, China, 8-11 August Pre-seismic Thermal Anomalies of the 2015 Mw = 7.8 Gorkha ( Nepal ) Earthquake from MODIS Surface Temperature Munawar Shahl,2 and Shuanggen Jinl lShanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200030, China 2University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100047, China Ahstract- Earthquake precursor is still a challenging question for scientists all over the world. It is difcult to predict the earthquake with reliable and sustainable evidences in order to mitigate the damages to human life. Although extensive and remarkable achievements on seismic anoma lies in the lithosphere, atmosphere, and ionosphere have been obtained with diferent remote sensors and GPS measurements from all around the world, pre-earthquake anomalies are still challenging. The Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) records variations of surface temperatures and may monitor the thermal anomaly before an earthquake. In this paper, the land surface temperature (LST) data from MODIS are used to analyze the thermal anoma lies before the 2015 Mw = 7.8 Gorkha (Nepal) earthquake. The results from MODIS (LST) show temporal variations of the thermal anomalies several days before the Gorkha earthquake, which signifcantly exceed the normal temperature range. It is also observed that the surface temperature rose to 3°C of the original value in the 10 days before the earthquake. The thermal anomalies may be an intrinsic signature of the earthquake preparing process. The mechanism of thermal breed and generated processes before earthquakes is still unclear, which needs more work and understandings in the future. 1. INTRODUCTION In order to mitigate damages and loses by earthquakes, scientists all around the world are looking for possible precursors prior to these calamities especially earthquakes using remote sensors and global positioning system ( GPS) . Ionospheric anomalies related to earthquakes have been observed by GPS data as well as earthquake dedicated satellite missions [ 2-5,7] . In addition, the land surface temperatures may also give us the anomalous signals around the epicenter zones due to the excitation of charged particles in the atmosphere ( e.g., [8]). The surface temperature data from the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ( MODIS) provided us opportunities to monitor the thermal anomaly before an earthquake. According to Tonin et al. [8], the accumulation of high amount of energy in the atmosphere due to collision of rocks inside the Earth may enhance the land surface temperature change. Therefore, the land surface temperature changes observed by MODIS may obtain some pre-seismic anomalies and insights on earthquakes. In this paper, we used MODIS land surface temperature and air temperature around the earthquake epicenter to investigate the possible pre-earthquake thermal anomaly of the 2015 Mw = 7.8 Gorkha ( Nepal ) earthquake. 2. DATA AND METHODS The epicenter of the Mw = 7.8 Gorkha earthquake is located in 80 km northeast of the capital city of Nepal ( Kathmandu) , see Fig. 1. The red star is the representation of epicenter while two blue triangles show the air temperature observatories. The source parameters of the 2015 Mw = 7.8 Gorkha ( Nepal ) earthquake are referred to USGS ( http://earthquake.usgs.gov ) , while land surface temperature images with 1 km resolution are acquired from MODIS data archive ( http:// worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov). Daily MODIS temperature data with 1 km resolution are averaged for the month of April 2015 before the Mw = 7.8 ( Nepal ) earthquake, which is plotted as the time in days shown in Fig. 2 ( b) . The data for the months of March and May ( 2015 ) are used as a reference for calculating the 95% confdence level. The mean and standard deviation are calculated for specifying the upper and lower bounds of the normal distribution of averaged MODIS data, which is shown as ( I ± 2 x 0) in Fig. 2 ( b) , where I is the mean and 0 is the standard deviation. It can be noted that MODIS data have higher value than the upper bound of the normal distribution, which is also unusual in the data of atmospheric temperature of nearby Meteorological analysis center. So the minimal diference in 5 days before the earthquake is 10% from the normal days. 4755