Multifractal detrended cross correlation analysis of Land-surface temperature anomalies and Soil radon concentration

The phenomenon of increasing the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere over the years is known as the Global warming. The Global warming has several adverse effects on our climate, our health and our communities. The resulting climate changes due to global warming produce significant changes in the weather patterns. It is also argued that the climate changes occurring due to global warming is responsible for the various geological hazards occurring in the world, like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis (Gutenberg and Richter, 1954; Turcotte and Schubert, 2002; Wu and Johnston, 2000; Wu and Hasegawa, 1996a; Wu and Hasegawa, 1996b; Wu, 1997). McGuire in his book (McGuire, 2012) has explained in detail the interlink between the climate changes occurring due to global warming and the occurrence of geological disasters like earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. Looking back to the past, when the climate changed naturally and our planet emerged from the ice age, the huge pressure exerted on the Earth’s crust suddenly disappeared causing the Earth’s crust to bounce back, the increased stress on the Earth’s crust activated earthquakes, tremors and volcanic eruptions along the pre-existing fault lines. Currently, our planet, the Earth is still responding to the end of the last ice age some 20,000 or more years ago when the temperatures began to rise, huge masses of ice-sheets disappeared resulting from the melting of large masses of ice. Thus the rising temperature may be related to the anomalous emanation of soil radon-222 gas prior to an earthquake. The prime focus of this paper is to search for any cross correlation existing between the daily land-surface temperature anomalies and the soil radon concentration using a robust state of art method, Multifractal detrended cross correlation analysis (MF-DXA). The data sets for both the series used for the analysis are for a period from 2005 to 2014. The analysis shows that these two time series are not only cross correlated but having the cross correlation coefficient γX=0.012±0.01, which clearly indicates a strong correlation between the soil radon-222 anomalies and the daily land-surface temperature anomalies.