Remote Sensing and Earthquakes. A Review

The current situation in earthquake space research indicates a few phenomena, related with earthquake: Earth's deformation, surface temperature, gas and aerosol content, electromagnetic disturbances in ionosphere. Both horizontal and vertical deformations scaled about tens centimetres and meters after the shock. Such deformations are recorded by InSAR technique with confidence. Pre-earthquake deformation are rather small centimetres. A few cases of deformation mapping after the shock using satellite data are known at present time. Future development lays in precision SAR systems with medium spatial resolution and combination with GPS technique. There are numerous observations of surface and near surface temperature growth on 3-5 С prior to Earth’s crust earthquakes. Modern IR satellite systems simply record such thermal anomalies. Methods of earthquake predictions are developing using thermal IR survey. Wellknown cases of gas and aerosol content change before the earthquake. Satellite methods allow to restore the concentrations of gases in atmosphere: O3, CH4, CO2, CO, H2S, SO2, HCl and aerosol. However the spatial resolution and sensitivity of modern systems are still low. First promising results were obtained only for ozone. Electromagnetic researches of ionosphere in relation with earthquake are widely spread now. Stable statistical estimations of ionosphere-lithosphere relation were obtained. A few new ionospheric satellites are prepared for launch.