Ionospheric response to the 2020 Samos earthquake and tsunami

The version of record of this article, first published in Earth, planets and space, is available online at Publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40623-023-01940-2
On 30 October 2020 at 11:51 UT, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake occurred in the Dodecanese sea (37.84°N, 26.81°E, 10 km depth) and generated a tsunami with an observed run-up of more than 1 m on the Turkish coasts. Both the earthquake and the tsunami produced acoustic and gravity waves that propagated upward, triggering co-seismic and co-tsunamic ionospheric disturbances. This paper presents a multi-instrumental study of the ionospheric impact of the earthquake and related tsunami based on ionosonde data, ground-based Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) data and data from DORIS beacons received by Jason3 in the Mediterranean region. Our study focuses on the Total Electron Content to describe the propagation of co-seismic and co-tsunami ionospheric disturbances (CSID, CTID), possibly related to gravity waves triggered by the earthquake and tsunami. We use simultaneous vertical ionosonde soundings to study the interactions between the upper and lower atmosphere, highlighting the detection of acoustic waves generated by the seismic Rayleigh waves reaching the ionosonde locations and propagating vertically up to the ionosphere. The results of this study provide a detailed picture of the Lithosphere-Atmosphere–Ionosphere coupling in the scarcely investigated Mediterranean region and for a relatively weak earthquake.
Upper Atmosphere Physics and Radiopropagation Working Group, Marcocci, C., Pezzopane, M., Pica, E., Romano, V., Sabbagh, D., Scotto, C., & Zuccheretti, E. (2020). Electronic Space Weather upper atmosphere database (eSWua)—HF data, version 1.0 (1.0). Istituto Nazionale di Geofsica e Vulcanologia (INGV). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.13127/ESWUA/HF. GNSS stations providers: (a) Uranus network (http://uranus.gr) operated by the Tree Company corpora‑ tion National Observatory of Athens (NOA) network, http://geodesy.gein.noa. gr:8000/nginfo/ (Ganas et al. 2008; Chousianitis et al. 2021). HxGN SmartNet operated by the Metrica SA (https://www.metrica.gr). (b) Turkish National Permanent GNSS Network-Active (TNPGN-Active/CORS-TR) https://www. tusaga-aktif.gov.tr/. (c) The DORIS measurements and orbits were obtained from https://cddis.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/doris/data. The authors thank Dr. Laura Scognamiglio and Dr. Paola Baccheschi from INGV for their support to interpret the seismograms. Anna Belehaki acknowledges fnancial support provided by the PITHIA-NRF Horizon 2020 Grant Agreement 101007599 of the European Commission. Elvira Astafyeva acknowledges the support of the French National Research Agency (ANR), project IONO-DIET (Grant ANR22-CE49-0011), and the French Space Agency (CNES), project “RealDetect”.
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