Improvements of the RST (Robust Satellite Techniques) approach for the thermal monitoring of the earthquake prone areas: an analysis on Italian peninsula in the period 2004-2012

In the past, a Robust Satellite data analysis Technique (RST) was proposed to investigate possible relations between earthquake occurrence and space-time fluctuations of Earth's emitted TIR radiation observed from satellite. Based on a statistically definition of "TIR anomalies" it allowed their identification even in very different natural (e.g. related to atmosphere and/or surface) and observational (e.g. related to time/season, but also to solar and satellite zenithal angles) conditions. RST approach has been implemented on different, polar and geostationary satellite systems (e.g. MSG/SEVIRI, GOES/IMAGER, EOS/MODIS, NOAA/AVHRR, etc.) and to earthquakes with a wide range of magnitudes (from 4.0 to 7.9) occurred in different tectonic contexts in all the world. In this paper, in order to further reduce false positives due to particular meteorological conditions, a refined RST approach is presented and validated on a long time series (9 years) of TIR satellite records collected by the geostationary satellite sensor MSG/SEVIRI over the Italian peninsula. The space-time persistence analysis performed on TIR anomaly maps shows: - a significant reduction of false positives; - several sequences of TIR anomalies, in a significant space-time relation with earthquakes with M>4. The relations among particular features of TIR anomalies (e.g. space-time extension and intensity) and earthquakes (e.g. magnitude, depth, focal mechanism) will be also discussed.