I. Introduction

A strong earthquake is a natural disaster destroying life and product function of the city instantly. The damage caused by earthquake is enormous and requires huge amount of time, money and labor to return back to the usual life again. Recently, various studies are conducted with the objective to predict the possibility of earthquake occurrence. One of such studies is the monitoring of the earth surface temperature changes on an active fault before the earthquake. Accordingly, this study aimed at investigating the possibility of predicting earthquake by monitoring the change in sea and ground surface temperatures with data of thermal infrared derived from the satellite NOAA/AVHRR. In doing so, we considered the Kii Peninsula Earthquake, Japan occurred on September 5, 2004 and the Chuetsu Earthquake, in Niigata prefecture, Japan occurred on October 23, 2004. Fig. 1 shows the epicenter locations of these two earthquakes and the observation points by circles.