| Description |
On March 4, 2020, DARPA released a call for research proposals that would fund projects "in the area of modeling, simulating, and experimentally observing transient disturbances (both mechanical and electromagnetic) in the Earth's atmosphere due to meteorological and geophysical sources" [1]. This research would directly apply to their AtmoSense (Atmosphere as a Sensor) project that wants to find novel methods for geolocation by taking advantage of measured disturbances in the Earth's atmosphere. A novel approach to geolocating earthquakes is by studying the interactions between the ionosphere and the disturbed electromagnetic fields from power lines during the event. This paper presents a finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) model that simulates a 2D cross section of a power line and surrounding space to showcase how the electric fields change during movement. A Discrete Fourier Transform is performed on the data to which shows the signals seen above the power line. The interactions between shaken power lines and the ionosphere could allow researchers to backtrack earthquake locations, giving them another way to passively measure earthquake phenomenon and understand how earthquakes affect different aspects of the environment. |
