Space-time fluctuations of Earth's emitted Thermal Infrared (TIR) radiation have been observed from satellite months to weeks before earthquakes occurrence. The general RST approach has been proposed in order to discriminate normal (i.e. related to the change of natural factor and/or observation conditions) TIR signal fluctuations from anomalous signal transient possibly associated to earthquake occurrence. In this work RST approach is applied to the Abruzzo 6 April 2009 event (M_L=5.8) by using for the first time MSG-SEVIRI (Meteosat Second Generation -Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager) thermal infrared observations. A validation/confutation analysis has been performed in order to verify the presence/absence of anomalous space-time TIR transients in the presence/absence of significant seismic activity. March–April 2009 has been analyzed for validation purposes. Relatively unperturbed periods (no earthquakes with M_L≥5) have been taken for confutation. A specific TIR anomalies space-time persistence analysis as well as a cloud coverage distribution test have been introduced in order to eliminate artifacts and outliers both in the validation and confutation phases. Preliminary results show clear differences in TIR anomalies occurrence during the periods used for validation and confutation purposes. Quite clear TIR anomalies appear also to mark main tectonic lines related to the preparatory phases of others, low magnitude (M_L~4) earthquakes, occurred in the area.

The literature often reports space–time relations between the abnormal variations of different kinds of nonseismological (i.e., geophysical, geochemical, and atmospheric) parameters and the occurrence of earthquakes. The integration of such observations with seismological ones could improve the quality of the seismic hazard assessment in the medium‐short term (months to days). Each considered parameter has, in principle, its capabilities to provide useful (and utilizable) information about seismic processes. Therefore, to define a system based on different observations, the first step is to estimate the informative contribution that each considered parameter could provide. In this paper, we will evaluate the potential of Significant Sequence of Thermal Anomalies (SSTAs). In particular, we adopted the broadly used Robust Satellite Techniques (RST) data analysis methodology to identify SSTAs over 11 years (June 2005 to December 2015) of nighttime satellite images acquired by MTSAT satellites over Japan. Aiming at reducing the false‐positive rate, we introduced and tested an innovative configuration of the RST, which is here presented. We executed a correlation analysis between SSTAs and Japanese earthquakes with M_JMA ≥ 6 by applying suitable constraints concerning space, time, and magnitude. The analysis highlights (a) the occurrence of just 29 SSTAs in the 11‐year period of observation, (b) 18 SSTAs (i.e., 62%) occur in an apparent space–time relation to earthquakes, and (c) 13 of them occur before the quake. Results of the random test analysis, based on error diagrams, confirm a noncasual correlation between “RST‐based satellite thermal anomalies” and earthquake occurrences. In particular, for M_JMA ≥ 6.5 earthquakes, probability gain is up to better than 4.3 as compared with the random guess.