Statistical detection of the influence of solar activities to weak earthquakes

Abstract

Abstract In the literature, it has been hypothesized that the solar wind released by the Sun affects the Earth as a trigger to cause earthquakes. This hypothesis is on the basis of the observation that the frequency of earthquakes rises at the period of solar minimum. In recent years, various physical measurements on the solar wind like velocity and temperature etc. became available. With these data, we focus on investigating the relation between the solar activities and the earthquakes. For this purpose, we constructed generalized auto-regressive models with exogenous variables obeying a Poisson or a negative binomial distribution, in which the response variable is the frequency of earthquakes with Richter magnitude scales 4-4.9 (EQ4-4.9), and the explanatory variables are nine physical measurements about the solar wind, the magnetospheres of the interplanetary magnetic field and the Earth. Model selection was conducted by using Bayesian information criterion based forward stepwise selection. Finally, numerical results showed that the exogenous variables of solar wind are statistically significant for the frequency of EQ4-4.9.