Properties of GPS noise at Japan islands before and after Tohoku mega-earthquake

The field of 3-components GPS signals is analyzed for the network of 1203 stations at the Japanese islands from January 30 up to March 26, 2011. This time interval includes just over 40 days of observation before the Tohoku mega-earthquake on March 11, 2011 (M = 9.0) and nearly 16 days of observation following this event. The signals from each station are three-component time series with time step 30 minutes. We study the statistical properties of the random fluctuations of GPS signals before and after the seismic catastrophe after transition to increments. The values of wavelet-based spectral index for GPS noise components for each station were estimated separately for pieces of records before and after seismic event. The maps of the noise spectral index are constructed as the values for grid size of 50 × 50 nodes covering the region under study, based on information from 10 stations closest to each node. These maps clearly extract the region of future seismic catastrophe by relatively high noise spectral index. The using of principal components method distinguished this spatial anomaly more explicitly. These results support the hypothesis that statistical properties of random fluctuations of geophysical fields carry important information about earthquake preparation.