A Retrospective Analysis about the Italy Emilia M6.0 Earthquake Prediction

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.