Unusual behavior of Very Low Frequency signal during the earthquake at Honshu/Japan on 11 March, 2011

• DOI: 10.1007/s12648-014-0520-8
• Publication Date: 2014-06-10T22:43:56Z
• Authors: S Sasmal; S K Chakrabarti; S Ray
• Keywords: Terminator (solar); SIGNAL (programming language); Sunrise; Earthquake magnitude

We present evidence of unusual Very Low Frequency (VLF) signal amplitude variation during the devastating earthquake of magnitude 9.0 which occurred at Honshu, in Japan on 11 March, 2011. We use the SoftPAL very low frequency receiver placed at Ionospheric and Earthquake Research Centre of Indian Centre for Space Physics, located at Sitapur (Lat. 22°30′N, Long. 87°47′E). We observe significant changes in signal amplitude from JJI (Lat. 32°05′N, Long. 131°51′E) station transmitting at a frequency of 22.2 kHz prior to the earthquake. We analyze signal amplitude for almost 2 weeks to establish a possible seismo–ionospheric correlation. We observe significant shift of the sunrise terminator time up to 2 days before the earthquake and the shift is found to be maximum on the day of the earthquake. In addition, we observe unusual increase of the D-layer disappearance time during the earthquake and the value becomes maximum on the day of the earthquake. These findings generally agree with our previous findings reported elsewhere.