Ionospheric changes immediately before the 2023 February Kahramanmaras earthquakes, Turkey

The East Anatolian Fault in southern Turkey ruptured on 6 February 2023, causing a Mw 7.8 earthquake. Another large earthquake of Mw 7.5 occurred to the north of the first event similar to 9 h later. Here we look for ionospheric precursors immediately before these earthquakes, like those found similar to 40 min before the 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake, Japan, by using the total electron content data obtained by global navigation satellite system receivers. Considering that the changes are small, we first inferred the leading times and the intensities of the anomalies using their empirical relationship with Mw from similar to 20 past large earthquakes. For the first earthquake, we found that a positive change of TEC trends started similar to 23 min before the rupture and that the anomaly reached similar to 2 % of the background. These values were consistent with past events. On the other hand, medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbance activity hampered convincing detec (c) 2024 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.