CSES-01 Electron Density Background Characterisation and Preliminary Investigation of Possible Ne Increase before Global Seismicity

In this paper, we provide a characterisation of the ionosphere from April 2018 to September 2022 for 48 investigated months. We used the data of the China Seismo Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES-01), which is a sun-synchronous satellite with five days of revisit time and fixed local time of about 2 a.m. and 2 p.m. The unique orbit of CSES-01 permitted us to produce a monthly background of the ionosphere for night- and daytime with median values acquired during geomagnetic quiet time in equatorial and mid-latitude regions (i.e., between 50° S and 50° N of geographical latitude). We compared the obtained CSES-01 monthly median values with the solar activity in terms of sunspot numbers, and we found a high correlation of 0.89 for nighttime and 0.85 for daytime between the mean sunspot number and the maximum of the characterised CSES-01 Ne map values. In addition, we extracted all the anomalous positive increases in CSES-01 electron density and compared them with the Worldwide M5.5+ shallow earthquakes. We tested two different definitions of anomaly based on median and interquartile range or (mild) outliers. We tried two relationships between anomalies inside Dobrovolsky’s area before the earthquake and the magnitude of the same seismic events: one which considers distance in space and time and a second which only uses the anticipation time of the anomaly before the earthquake. Using both anomaly definitions, we searched the best coefficients for these two laws for mid-latitude and equational regions. We found that the best coefficients are independent of the anomaly definition, but better accuracy (greater than 80%) is obtained for the outlier definition. Finally, using receiving operating characteristic (ROC) curves, we show that CSES-01 increases seem statistically correlated to the incoming seismic activity.