Thermal anomalies associated with faults: a case study of the Jinhua–Quzhou basin of Zhejiang Province, China

Abstract

Faults provide the path for geothermal natural convection and partially influence the ground surface thermal environment. The land surface temperatures (LSTs) near a fault are higher than in other areas and can indicate the strike trend of an underground fault. However, these anomalies of higher LSTs are not located accurately in the fault centre but near it with some offset, and these LST data may include other thermal information that needs to be eliminated prior to analysis. In this study, LSTs were retrieved from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) thermal infrared (TIR) images and enhanced with land cover classification and elimination. The spatial patterns of the enhanced images were compared with geophysical prospecting tectonic profiles and with regional geological tectonic maps, revealing the spatial correspondence between the thermal anomalies and the faults. The results indicated that the thermal anomalies are located near the faults and are consistent with the faults' dip planes.

Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. Changjiang Li of the Land and Resource Information Centre of Zhejiang Province for supporting this work, the China National Meteorological Information Centre for providing the meteorological data and the PetroChina Hangzhou Research Institute of Geology for providing the geophysical prospecting tectonic profiles. We also thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions, which have helped to improve the earlier version of the article.