QUAKES PREDICTED BY UNIQUE CLOUD FORMATIONS

The Zhonghao Shou Darrell Harrington Earthquake Prediction Center http://quake.exit.com claims to have predicted a significant number of recent major quakes by analysis of satellite cloud images. Yesterdays quake near the Telos Islands was heralded by one of these cloud phenomena and the UN alerted.

Unfortunately this is underfunded and very new technology and so the risk of causing public panic will preclude it's use as an early warning mechanism until it is better understood. It is of considerable interest to anyone who lives in an active seismic area.

Most conventional work using satellites to predict earthquakes has focused on monitoring tiny movements of the earth's crust. An alternative approach that has recently shown great promise is satellite imaging of strange non-meteorological cloud formations and their correlation with earthquakes.

Shou is convinced that these clouds are formed when rock formations along highly stressed faults start to fracture ahead of a major event. The micro fractures fill with water which is super heated and this in turn is expelled into the atmosphere some time ahead of the quake. Exactly how long is not well understood but a window of 60 days is conservative. Sometimes only hours pass before a big quake.

The clouds are readily visible from the ground near the epicenter and can take the form of straight lines, feathers, snaking or curved lines or wave forms depending on winds and pre-existing atmospheric conditions. In some recorded cases hot gases have burned victims many hours before quakes where fault lines pass below inhabited areas. Perhaps this explains why some Aceh tsunami survivors were severely burned by hot black oily water that they say followed the wave or in some cases erupted from fields just before the wave hit.



The first recording of the successful use of this method dates back to China 381 years ago and interest in it has recently been revived both there and in Japan.

Shou observed a "quake cloud" (see above) to predict the Bam earthquake of Dec. 26, 2003. Predictions were made public on the internet (@1) at 17:58 UTC, Dec. 25, 2003.

The Bam earthquake occurred precisely on the predicted fault, and its magnitude was within the predicted magnitude windows. For more see http://quake.exit.com