Correlation between seismicity and barometric tidal exalting

Abstract

Changes of barometric pressure in the area of Thessaloniki in Northern Greece were studied by analyzing a sample of 31 years of hourly measurements. The results of this analysis on the periodicities of tidal components are expressed in terms of amplitude and phases variability. An earlier investigation revealed a detectable correlation between the exalting of the amplitude parameters of the tidal waves with strong seismic events. A problem of this work was that we had compared the tidal parameters resulting from the analysis of data covering the period of one year with instantaneous seismic events, although the earthquake is the final result of a tectonic process of the upper lithosphere. Consequently, in order to increase the resolution of our method we had analyzed our data in groups of 3-months extent and the resulted amplitudes were compared with seismicity index for corresponding time periods. A stronger correlation was found in the last case. However, the estimation of tidal parameters in this case was restricted to short period (from one day down to eight hours) constituents. Therefore, a new analysis was performed, retaining the one-year length of each data block but shifting the one year window by steps of three months from the beginning to the end of the 31 years period. This way, we are able to estimate again tidal parameters ranging from periods of one year (Sa) down to eight hours (M3). The resulting correlation between these tidal parameters with a cumulative seismicity index for corresponding time intervals was remarkably increased.