New software development applied to supervise monitoring and surveillance of active volcanoes

Abstract

New monitoring techniques, with on line data processing and continuous data update, are very important to understand volcanoes activities and for correct hazard evaluation. Software development is one of the basis line of new surveillance methods for volcanic areas, like Eastern Sicily and the Aeolian Island. In the last two years, the ‘Unità Funzionale Sala Operativa’ of the ‘Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Catania (INGV)’ has realized the new monitoring centre in Catania, based on new automatic systems, able to spread in near real time all the most significant information. New hardware/software architectures have been developed to acquire, analyze and visualize on line data, providing higher accuracy and robustness. They represent latest development in data processing technique (in particular for seismic signals, digital image processing, etc). All the obtained outputs are immediately available and they are continuously compared with assigned thresholds to produce alert signals. In particular new information is furnished as continuous data on the Intranet and Internet INGV Web sites.