Real time seismic monitoring in South-Central Europe: data sharing, cooperation and improvements of the OGS NI Seismic Network

Abstract

The Centro di Ricerche Sismologiche (CRS, Seismological Research Center) of the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS, Italian National Institute for Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics) in Udine (Italy) after the strong earthquake of magnitude Mw=6.4 occurred in 1976 in the Italian Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, started to operate the North-eastern Italy (NI) Seismic Network: it currently consists of 13 very sensitive broad band and 21 simpler short period seismic stations, all telemetered to and acquired in real time at the OGS-CRS data centre in Udine. Real time data exchange agreements in place with neighbouring Italian, Slovenian, Austrian and Swiss seismological institutes lead to a total number of 94 seismic stations acquired in real time, which makes the OGS the reference institute for seismic monitoring of North-eastern Italy. Since 2002 OGS-CRS is using the Antelope software suite on a SUN SPARC cluster as the main tool for collecting, analyzing, archiving and exchanging seismic data, initially in the framework of the EU Interreg IIIA project “Trans-national seismological networks in the South-Eastern Alps”. At OGS-CRS we spent a considerable amount of efforts in improving the long-period performances of the broad-band seismic stations, either by carrying out full re-installations and/or applying thermal insulations to the seismometers: the example of the new PRED broad-band seismic station installation in the cave tunnel of Cave del Predil using a Quanterra Q330HR high resolution digitizer and a Streckeisen STS-2 broad-band seismometer will be illustrated. Efforts have been also put in strengthening the reliability of data links, either from stations to data centre by exploring the use of redundant satellite/radio/GPRS links, and between different data centres by exploiting the usage of the Antelope “orbxchange” module. An example of the usage of the “orbxchange” module in acquiring data from the seismic station of Acomizza (ACOM) at the border between Austria and Italy in both OGS in Italy and ZAMG in Austria data centres will be presented.