Earthquake Hazards and Monitoring of Seismo-ionospheric Precursor

Earthquake, a natural phenomenon, causes huge destruction to human life, economical loss, material properties, eco-system and environment. Strength of destruction depends upon the magnitude (or intensity) of the earthquake. Developments of earthquake prediction techniques both at the short- and long-time scales are useful to reduce losses. Understanding of seismo-ionospheric precursor technique is one of them and is emerging area and challenging task for scientific community to find realistic precursor associated with earthquake. In this chapter, brief about earthquake and its magnitude over different scales, earthquake preparation processes and area affected, techniques to monitor it have been presented. Efforts have also been made to point out different techniques to find the seismo-ionospheric precursors. Application of statistical method in detail to find ionospheric precursor using GPS and VLF measurements has been discussed. For earthquake forecasting point of view, ionospheric precursor signals are in short time scale and forecasting of earthquake in short time scale is challenging task to save property and life of human being. The future scope of this study may be useful in earthquake forecasting using ionospheric precursor technique with dense network of GPS receiver having very high resolution and precision.