Earthquakes and Thermal Anomalies in a Remote Sensing Perspective

Earthquakes are the sudden tremors of the ground leaving behind damages to life and property, ranging from smaller to massive scale. Since very early times, earthquake prediction has been in the limelight of the scientific community. In the texts of ancient civilizations, earthquake predictions can be found which is based on the position of the planets with respect to the earth. With the advent of real time observations from various data sources many attempts are going on this direction. The present chapter investigates and put forward some facts based on data obtained from satellites for an earthquake which occurred in Imphal, India, in 2016. It studies the thermal anomaly data that took place before the earthquake. MODIS Land Surface Temperature (LST) product was used wherein daily night time images of 6 years have been used for the study. Good quality pixels having maximum information were identified by performing Quality Assurance of the datasets. A change detection technique for satellite data analysis namely Robust Satellite Technique has been used and RETIRA index has been calculated. The study of this RETIRA index has been done for 3 years and it has been found that the RETIRA index is considerably high for the earthquake year. But it cannot be concluded that high value of RETIRA index is a sure indicator for an earthquake and hence it leaves scope for future studies.