Assessing precursory signals with kinematic GNSS: Insights from the 2023 Mw 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake

Abstract

Identifying precursors of large earthquakes is critical for minimizing the losses of life and property. Recently, Bletery and Nocquet (2023) captured a ∼2-h-long exponential acceleration of slip using the high-rate (5-min) Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) time series from the 48 ​hr before the 2011 M_W 9.0 Tohoku-oki earthquake, which was obtained by simply concatenating daily kinematic results together. Here, we apply their method to sum the horizontal displacements of 24 high-rate GNSS stations in the direction predicted by fault slip at the hypocenter of the 2023 M_W 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake to characterize its precursory phase. Results demonstrate a several-hour accelerating exponential slip before the mainshock. However, considering that single-day processing would lead to discontinuities at the day boundary, we process the multi-day GNSS data in continuous mode, repeat the experiment, and find that the observed acceleration-like signals vanish. Our work shows that inadequate data processing may lead to the detection of false precursory signals, highlighting the need to develop robust processing techniques to identify reliable precursory signals before large earthquakes.

Keywords

High-rate GNSS / Kahramanmaraş earthquake / Accelerating exponential slip / Continuous data processing / Precursory signals

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jingqi Wang: Writing - original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. Rumeng Guo: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Project administration, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Jianqiao Xu: Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition. Heping Sun: Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition.

Availability statement

The raw GNSS data are provided by Türkiye Ulusal Sabit GNSS Ağı-Aktif (TUSAGA-Active) System (https://www.tusaga-aktif.gov.tr/Web/DepremVerileri.aspx) and are processed with the PRIDE PPP-AR software. The PRIDE PPP-AR is available at https://github.com/PrideLab/PRIDE-PPPAR. The Bletery and Nocquet's code and results are available at https://zenodo.org/records/8064086. The scripts and data utilized in this study are available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14173350). The hypocenter location is provided from the relocated AFAD catalog by Anthony Lomax (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7727678).

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have influenced the work reported in this paper.

Author agreement and acknowledgement

We thank Editor Zhigang Peng and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. We thank Prof. Jianghui Geng and Dr. Qiang Wen for their guidances in the use of the PRIDE PPP-AR software. This study was supported by National Science Foundation of China (42025401), Natural Science Foundation of Wuhan (2024040701010065), Knowledge Innovation Program of Wuhan-Shuguang Project (2023010201020281), Open Fund of Hubei Luojia Laboratory (230100015 and 220100033), Innovation Group Project of Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (2023AFA040), and National Precise Gravity Measurement Facility, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.

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