Developing a Fuzzy Inference System Based on Multi-Sensor Data to Predict Powerful Earthquake Parameters

Abstract

Predicting the parameters of upcoming earthquakes has always been one of the most challenging topics in studies related to earthquake precursors. Increasing the number of sensors and satellites and consequently incrementing the number of observable possible earthquake precursors in different layers of the lithosphere, atmosphere, and ionosphere of the Earth has opened the possibility of using data fusion methods to estimate and predict earthquake parameters with low uncertainty. In this study, a Mamdani fuzzy inference system (FIS) was proposed and implemented in five case studies. In particular, the magnitude of Ecuador (16 April 2016), Iran (12 November 2017), Papua New Guinea (14 May 2019), Japan (13 February 2021), and Haiti (14 August 2021) earthquakes were estimated by FIS. The results showed that in most cases, the highest number of anomalies was usually observed in the period of about one month before the earthquake and the predicted magnitude of the earthquake in these periods was slightly different from the actual magnitude value. Therefore, based on the results of this study, it could be concluded that if a significant number of anomalies are observed in the time series of different precursors, it is likely that an earthquake of the magnitude predicted by the proposed FIS system within the Dobrovolsky area of the studied location will happen during the next month.