Cloud
anomaly is a new kind of earthquake precursor that is still in the great
controversy. Here we report an example of earthquake prediction based on cloud
satellite anomaly. According to the cloud anomaly that appeared over eastern
Italy on 21-23 April 2012, we made a prediction to Italy National Institute of
Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) that there will be a M5.5 - M6.0 earthquake
in Italy in 30 days. Finally, the M6.0 quake occurred in northern Italy on 20
May 2012 and this verified our prediction. In this paper we extend the cloud
image data from 2010 to 2013 and found 23 cloud anomalies totally, among them
only the duration of the cloud on April 21-23 2012 exceed the 2 times, even 3
times of standard deviation threshold and it can be considered as a significant
anomaly. Our analysis shows that the quake’s date and magnitude can be
estimated accurately with the formula, and the epicenter can be estimated with the
temperature anomaly method with 100 - 200 km error. This paper shows a
promising method in earthquake prediction, of course it is only one example,
and it still needs more examples to verify this method.
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