I have data on the release of CO from the ground followed by the production of ozone at the ground-to-air interface. There is also evidence that radon release is also influenced by human activity that translates into a small increase in the vibrational load of the ground.
There is an excellent paper that addresses subtle variations in the radon signal: Steinitz, G., P. Kotlarsky and O. Piatibratova (2016). "Indications for influence of artificial (man-made) activity on radon signals, in simulation experiments." Proc. R. Soc. A 472: 20160311.
There is a nice paper on the anomalies of total column CO and O3 associated with great earthquakes (Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 13, 2513–2519, 2013, www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/13/2513/2013/, doi:10.5194/nhess-13-2513-2013).
We have observed aerosol and atmospheric particulate matters anomalies before great earthquakes. The China satellite GF-5, to be launched in 2017-2018, will have capability in CO, CH4, and CO2 observation, which will provide data for your research.
Thanks Lixin and Jianguo,
yes, this is a remarkable paper with lots of very interesting and well-documented data. I have, however, a serious problem with the interpretation of both the CO and ozone observations. As the Abstract states: "...The anomalies of CO concentration related to the earthquake can be mainly attributed to gas emission from the lithosphere and photochemical reaction, while the anomalous increases in O3 concentration can be mainly due to the transport of O3-enriched air and photochemical reaction." This is a wishiwashi explanation that offers no real explanation. Unfortunately the authors appear to have had no knowledge of our attached paper published in 2009 in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics on stress-induced ionization of air on the surface of rocks. First there are only positive ions, then bursts of positive and negative ions accompanied by flashes of light, indicative of tiny corona discharges. Of course, if such corona discharges occur out in nature, due to the relentless increase of stresses deep below, ozone will be produced. Exactly as this remarkable paper describes, which Lixin is bringing to our attention, and exactly as Jianguo states "that ozone is one of trace gases near the ground surface".
@Friedman Freund
Dear Professor Freund,
Ozone was included traditionally in the atmospheric chemistry models from 1990's. The notable examples are MOZART
https://www2.acom.ucar.edu/gcm/mozart
as well as CHRONOS and GEM-MACH models
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_numerical_weather_prediction
Recent experimental evidence, supported by your paper, indicates the necessity of including some of the processes in the crust and electrodynamics of coupling between the surface and the ionosphere. The modeling system under the provisional name GNOME (Global Nonstandard Ozone Modeling Environment) is currently prepared to investigate feasibility of such an approach. The system is based on a icosahedral geodesic mesh. The earth is represented by the triaxial ellipsoid with orography and the model is furnished with the movable bottom boundary to represent movement of the crust.
I'm not sure if this type of work is new. I'm planning, however, to elaborate some of the results in the form of a scientific paper outlining all details of the mathematical formulation, the results paper will follow.
I will certainly appreciate any suggestions concerning this approach.
With my best regards,
J. Pudykiewicz
Dear Dr. Pudykiewicz,
Thanks for your informative remarks. Yes, I agree with you that it would be very valuable to pay attention to the mechanism of formation of ozone, in particular it the process points to a source near the Earth surface. First of all, it must be more widely recognized that UV photolysis is not the only way, O3 formation as a result of tectonically activated positive hole charge carriers, flowing from deep within the Earth crust, accumulating at the surface and causing billions of tiny corona discharges, is a strong candidate. We are currently preparing a paper where we show we can measure, in a remote seismically active region, the whole suite of processes predicted on the basis of our laboratory experiments, namely (1) the emission of ULF electromagnetic waves due to transient positive hole currents deep below, (2) the emanation of CO from the soil, followed with a time delay by (3) positive air ionization, followed (4) by the formation of ozone at the ground-to-air interface, and (5) coincident negative air ionization.
I would be very interested to learn more about GNOME and about the observational data that can be used to feed into this global ozone modeling effort. Who is doing GNOME and where can I learn more about it?
Thanks – Friedemann
Dear Friedemann,
Thank you very much for the informative letter with a very helpful information.
GNOME is a model comprising of covariant form of both the Maxwell equations and the advection-diffusion-reaction equations on a rotating triaxial ellipsoid with orography.
At this moment, I have completed a paper outlining the tensorial formalism which is used in this work. Another paper with description of GNOME including the grid system and the time integration methods is quite advanced. The model uses the exponential integration scheme to allow an integration of the this difficult system with multiple time scales in the efficient manner.
Computational experiments are in progress. In the development of the model, I have opted to use the MATLAB sparse matrix formalism because of its flexibility and a very good speed (this is contrary to some false opinions that the MATLAB is slow). If the code is promising I will convert it to FORTRAN.
I will keep you informed on the evolution of this project.
With my best regards,
Janusz