# The Conditional Probability of Correlating East Pacific Earthquakes with NOAA Electron Bursts
## 4 Discussion  
A comparison of the possible results obtained above for East Pacific EQs with those obtained for West Pacific EQs [27] is useful to describe the similarities and differences between them. The first striking difference was found in the correlation time difference which was a few hours for West Pacific EQs and a few days for East Pacific EQs, even if EBs anticipated EQs. The first striking similarity was found between the maximum CE number. Concerning the CE significance, calculated using the \(\sigma\) number, the results were slightly worse being the maximum significance of a little more than 4, observed for bin intervals of 4 h, compared to a little more than 5 for bin intervals of 2 h of the past. The CE number relative to the maximum significance was lower for the East Pacific case. The geographical positions of EBs were nearly entirely overlapping, with a slight shift to the East of around 10\({}^{\circ}\), whereas the relative positions concerning the correlated EQ epicenters were completely different and non-overlapping. Altitudes of electrons calculated over the new EQ epicenters were also completely different, resulting in many hundreds of kilometers lower compared to past studies. The EQ area in the West Pacific belonged more to the Northern hemisphere than to the area of the East Pacific EQs that belonged more to the Southern hemisphere. This seems to reflect the geomagnetic field asymmetry, following the geomagnetic equator crossing the geographic equator from north to south and moving eastwards to those longitudes. The EQs are instead quite similar for the two regions, being in both cases superficial and equally distributed between land and oceanic crusts. Concerning the adiabatic parameters of EBs, the L-shell range in this study resulted in being more extended towards lower values, and the latitude dependence was lost for positive latitudes. Moreover, the positive latitude dependence of L-shell was observed for EBs over West Pacific EQ epicenters around 125\({}^{\circ}\), see Figure 2 of [27]. However, EB longitudes over East Pacific EQs are close to the SAA, where the geomagnetic field deviates from the dipolar shape. Specifically, the angle between the satellite's orbit and the geomagnetic line is small for positive latitudes and close to 90\({}^{\circ}\) for negative latitudes. Therefore, the satellite crosses the 1.1 \(\leq\) L \(\leq\) 1.3 in more than 20\({}^{\circ}\) of positive latitude, whereas it crossed the same interval in 5\({}^{\circ}\) of negative latitudes. In fact, the pitch angle of positive latitude EBs is restricted to 56\({}^{\circ}\)\(\leq\)\(\alpha\)\(\leq\) 72\({}^{\circ}\) while the pitch angle of negative latitude EBs is restricted to 108\({}^{\circ}\)\(\leq\)\(\alpha\)\(\leq\) 126\({}^{\circ}\). Furthermore, two different distribution bands were observed, see Figure 3, for negative latitudes. They were separated approximately by \(\alpha\) = 120\({}^{\circ}\), with 1.1 \(\leq\) L \(\leq\) 1.22 in the interval 108\({}^{\circ}\)\(\leq\)\(\alpha\)\(\leq\) 120\({}^{\circ}\) and with 1.22 \(\leq\) L \(\leq\) 1.3 in the interval 120\({}^{\circ}\)\(\leq\)\(\alpha\)\(\leq\) 126\({}^{\circ}\). The pitch angle results are divided into two intervals for both studies, coinciding exactly. Being so, the striking difference in the correlation times between the two studies seems to be more naturally associated with the major difference retrieved from the correspondent analyzed data of the two cases: which is the altitude of electrons passing above the East and West Pacific EQs. If the Lithosphere-Ionosphere interaction occurs above the future epicenters and the magnitude depends on the distance of electrons from the lithosphere; as previously proposed for magnetic pulses [6], a lower altitude of charged particles above the East Pacific means that lower magnitude magnetic pulses could be able to modify electron trajectories, even if the general behavior of magnetic pulses have not been proven decreased with the temporal remoteness of strong EQs.