Abstract:
Biography of Ronald Karel:
Ronald Karel, a Turkish-French dual citizen, was born in Istanbul. His interest in meteorology, and in particular clouds, began from an early age. When he was 13-14 years old, he was able to carry out weather forecasts across Turkey.
On 28 March 1970, precisely at 4:20pm , he observed the "non-meteorological clouds" above Istanbul for the first time. The same night, a major earthquake (7.2 in Richter scale) took place in Gediz. Mr Karel was able to predict several more earthquakes through the same method. These predictions and studies led him to his "meteoquake" theory in 1974 during his military service in Askale/ Erzurum.
His theory, which seeks to explain the relationship between meteorological events and earthquakes, was rejected by many major organisations for over 20 years. In recent years, however several research groups have started to express interest in this theory. Mr Karel attended the DEMETER conference in 2006 to present his work to a group of 49 scientists who are now interested in the meteoquake theory.
*GEO Group: The Group for Earth Observation GEO's background has arisen from the perceived need to enable amateur reception of the new generation of weather and earth imaging satellites which are already in orbit or planned for launch in the near future. Eumetsat's MSG-1, with its spectacular images of Earth every 15 minutes, is an example of the latest satellite being received by the Group's members. The people leading this Group have experience in amateur radio, electronics, meteorology, oceanography, satellites, computing and publishing: hence they are a very strong and competent team. They are quoted as saying they just wish to share their skills freely with other amateurs.
**DEMETER: The existence of electrical and magnetic disturbances associated with earthquakes has long been observed. Demeter, the first microsatellite of the Myriade series should confirm this hypothesis. Its purpose is to study disturbances in the upper atmosphere related to natural geophysical phenomena, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or tsunamis (tidal waves).