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A digital low power pulse compressed ionosonde was developed at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome, Italy. The aim of this Advanced Ionospheric Sounder, AIS-INGV, is to reduce the transmitted power and, consequently, weight, size, power consumption and hardware complexity. To compensate the power reduction the most advanced HF radar techniques such as the pulse compression and a phase coherent integration are used. The ionosonde is completely programmable and a PC supports the data acquisition, control, storage and on-line processing. The first prototype was installed at Gibilmanna Ionospheric Observatory (Sicily), an interesting location in the center of Mediterranean area. The new ionosonde will contribute to ionospheric database and real time knowledge of South European ionospheric conditions for space weather applications. In this work the first results (ionograms and autoscaled characteristics) are presented and briefly discussed.

A new digital ionosonde called AIS-INGV (Advanced Ionospheric Sounder) was designed both for research and for routine service of HF radio wave propagation forecast. Nearly the entire system was developed in the Laboratorio di Geofisica Ambientale at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome. It exploits advanced techniques for signal analysis, recent technological devices and PC resources. This paper describes design concepts and performance of the new ionosonde.

The Italian Ionospheric Antarctic Observatory of Terra Nova Bay (74.70S, 164.11E) was recently equipped with the AIS-INGV ionosonde developed at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome, (Italy). This paper aims to describe briefly which are the main characteristics of the instrument and show the good quality and reliability of the recorded ionograms.

The ionosonde is a system which exploits the radar technique: it applies electromagnetic waves with variable frequency in the HF band to measure the ionospheric layers electron density, height and other parameters. This paper is a technical report on the new digital ionosonde (AIS-INGV), which was designed both for research purposes and for the routine service of the HF radiowave propagation forecast. It has been developed almost completely within the Laboratorio di Geofisica Ambientale (LGA) at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV). It exploits advanced techniques for the signal analysis, recent technological devices and PC resources. The report is divided into two parts; the first is a general description of the design development, the second is a more detailed description of the blocks and circuits actually built and tested, directed to a specialist reader.

www.earth-prints.org aims to satisfy the increasing demand of fast, up-to-date, easy-accessible, and free-of-charge sources of information in all branches of Geosciences. It allows earth scientists to deposit electronic documents into its collections and to index them by subjects and keywords. Earth-prints provides a time-stamp to all deposited materials to insure precedence rights to original ideas and scientific results. It deals with copyright issues through Creative Common standards that offer a wide variety of licenses. All deposited material is made immediately available to the public. Subscribers will be sent a daily newsletter according to the topics they have signed in. The archive has a three-level hierarchical structure. The top level includes Atmosphere, Cryosphere, Hydrosphere, Solid Earth, and General. It then branches into several disciplines within the other two levels. Different collections take in different kinds of material, such as pre-prints, oral presentations, extended abstracts, published papers, conference papers, books and book chapters, posters, and Web products and databases. Earth-Prints main language is English but it accepts documents in other languages also, giving visibility to data and studies at local scale that are indeed of general interests. An abstract in English is always required. We will present a virtual tour into the many features of Earth-prints to provide all its potential users with an easy acquaintance of the system and make them explore its capabilities. Although the archive is based on latest information technology it requires no specific knowledge to be used because it manages all procedures for access, navigation, upload of documents and information retrieval through a user-friendly interface. What is the limit of open archive development? We think that the one and only limit of open archives is the eagerness of its users to share information and knowledge.

We set up a computational tool to numerically model static and quasi-static deformation generated by faulting sources embedded in plane or spherical domains. We use a Finite Element (FE) approach to automatically implement arbitrary faulting sources and calculate displacement and stress fields induced by slip on the fault. The package makes use of the capabilities of CalculiX, a non commercial FE software designed to solve field problems (see for details), and is freely distributed by request.

The historical sources of large and moderate earthquakes, earthquake catalogues and monographs exist in many depositories in Syria and European centers. They have been studied, and the detailed review and analysis resulted in a catalogue with 181 historical earthquakes from 1365 B.C. to 1900 A.D. Numerous original documents in Arabic, Latin, Byzantine and Assyrian allowed us to identify seismic events not mentioned in previous works. In particular, detailed descriptions of damage in Arabic sources provided quantitative information necessary to re-evaluate past seismic events. These large earthquakes (I0>VIII) caused considerable damage in cities, towns and villages located along the northern section of the Dead Sea fault system. Fewer large events also occurred along the Palmyra, Ar-Rassafeh and the Euphrates faults in Eastern Syria. Descriptions in original sources document foreshocks, aftershocks, fault ruptures, liquefaction, landslides, tsunamis, fires and other damages. We present here an updated historical catalogue of 181 historical earthquakes distributed in 4 categories regarding the originality and other considerations, we also present a table of the parametric catalogue of 36 historical earthquakes (table I) and a table of the complete list of all historical earthquakes (181 events) with the affected locality names and parameters of information quality and completeness (table II) using methods already applied in other regions (Italy, England, Iran, Russia) with a completeness test using EMS-92. This test suggests that the catalogue is relatively complete for magnitudes >6.5. This catalogue may contribute to a comprehensive and unified parametric earthquake catalogue and to a realistic assessment of seismic hazards in Syria and surrounding regions.

This book contains the proceedings of the 1st WSEAS International Conference on Environmental and Geological Science and Engineering (EG'08) which was held in Malta, September 11-13, 2008. This conference aims to disseminate the latest research and applications in Renewable Energy, Mineral Resources, Natural Hazards and Risks, Environmental Impact Assessment, Urban and Regional Planning Issues, Remote Sensing and GIS, and other relevant topics and applications. The friendliness and openness of the WSEAS conferences, adds to their ability to grow by constantly attracting young researchers. The WSEAS Conferences attract a large number of well-established and leading researchers in various areas of Science and Engineering as you can see from http://www.wseas.org/reports. Your feedback encourages the society to go ahead as you can see in http://www.worldses.org/feedback.htm The contents of this Book are also published in the CD-ROM Proceedings of the Conference. Both will be sent to the WSEAS collaborating indices after the conference: www.worldses.org/indexes In addition, papers of this book are permanently available to all the scientific community via the WSEAS E-Library. Expanded and enhanced versions of papers published in this conference proceedings are also going to be considered for possible publication in one of the WSEAS journals that participate in the major International Scientific Indices (Elsevier, Scopus, EI, ACM, Compendex, INSPEC, CSA .... see: www.worldses.org/indexes) these papers must be of high-quality (break-through work) and a new round of a very strict review will follow. (No additional fee will be required for the publication of the extended version in a journal). WSEAS has also collaboration with several other international publishers and all these excellent papers of this volume could be further improved, could be extended and could be enhanced for possible additional evaluation in one of the editions of these international publishers. Finally, we cordially thank all the people of WSEAS for their efforts to maintain the high scientific level of conferences, proceedings and journals.

La distribuzione spaziale e temporale dei terremoti riveste un’importanza cruciale nella valutazione della pericolosità sismica, cioè della stima dello scuotimento sismico su una determinata area. Le faglie, strutture geologiche responsabili dei terremoti, sono spesso situate in profondità nel terreno e in alcuni casi individuate solo a seguito del verificarsi di un evento sismico. Esse possono rimanere inattive per lunghi periodi, talvolta anche secoli. Inoltre, quelle di dimensioni maggiori possono attivarsi solo in alcune parti o lungo tutta la loro lunghezza, provocando una grande varietà di scenari ed eventi di magnitudo anche molto diversa a seconda della porzione di faglia interessata. Un’analisi della sismicità limitata a pochi anni può fornire un quadro della “vita” delle faglie, in termini di intervallo tra gli eventi sismici ed energia rilasciata, incompleto. Estendere quanto più possibile nel tempo l’analisi dei terremoti assicura di definire con maggiore affidabilità e completezza la “pericolosità” sismica di una certa area. Tuttavia, la sismometria moderna inizia solo negli anni Sessanta del secolo scorso. Infatti, nonostante i numerosi tentativi, lungo quasi duemila anni, di costruire strumenti in grado di registrare terremoti e conservare i relativi sismogrammi, molti apparati costruiti prima di quel periodo non hanno ottenuto i risultati prefissati. E comunque nei numerosi casi, soprattutto a partire dalla fine dell’Ottocento, in cui gli strumenti hanno funzionato, solo una piccola parte delle loro registrazioni è stata rintracciata e archiviata. Se basassimo le nostre analisi di sismicità solo sui dati a partire dalla seconda metà del Novecento avremmo un quadro della sismicità della penisola italiana molto diverso da quello reale. Nella figura 1 sono riportati i terremoti di magnitudo superiore a 5 avvenuti a partire dal 1960. In base a quella carta, la Liguria non risulta mai essere stata interessata da terremoti “forti” mentre per altri settori della penisola, come la costa adriatica settentrionale, la Toscana e il Lazio, il quadro della sismicità è profondamente diverso rispetto alle conoscenze attuali. Perfino la Sicilia e la Calabria risultano poco sismiche. Si pone dunque il problema di ricostruire la sismicità per periodi nei quali non esistevano, o comunque non erano sufficientemente affidabili, strumenti sismici o per i quali le registrazioni sono andate perdute. In questo articolo, dopo una veloce ricostruzione della storia degli apparati sismici, vengono descritte le tecniche con le quali è possibile riconoscere e catalogare terremoti anche per periodi nei quali non esisteva strumentazione sismica.

We present the first version of the software POPE (Probability of Occurrence of Paleoseismic Earthquakes, POPEv1.0), designed to assist seismologists in reconstructing the timing of paleoseismic earthquakes on a fault, based on event ages derived from multiple trenches along that fault. The main feature of POPEv1.0 is that it accounts for uncertainties in the input paleoseismic data (i.e. the paleoearthquake ages from trenches) and generates multiple fault rupture scenarios by applying a probabilistic aggregation method that also considers less likely, but plausible, ways of combining paleoseis- mological data from different trenches. Some of these scenarios may subsequently be excluded through an independent expert selection process, based on their consistency with available stratigraphic, structural and historical constraints. To show the use of POPEv1.0 and discuss the underlying methodology, we apply it to the paleoseismic data from two faults in Central Italy, the Ovindoli-Pezza and Monte Ocre faults, and discuss the implications of results for seismic hazard assessment in the region

Threats from short-term extreme weather systems such as medicanes ("Mediterranean hurricanes"), combined with long-term sea-level rise, increasingly endanger coastal regions. The intensity of these cyclones is expected to rise due to warming sea surface temperatures and greater atmospheric moisture. In this study, we modeled the compound effects of a medicane under future sea-level rise and increased cyclone intensity. Using medicane Zorbas (September 2018) as a baseline for southeastern Sicily-a historically prone area-we simulated spectral significant wave heights and water levels with a coupled Delft3D-SWAN model for present and future scenarios (2050, 2100, 2150). Cyclone intensities were increased progressively by 8% (2050), 14% (2100), and 25% (2150), derived from high-emission sensitivity studies and applied as scenariobased perturbations, while track and storm size remained constant. Coastal flooding, sedimentation, and erosion were then modeled using XBeach under the SSP5-8.5 scenario. Model results were validated against tide gauge and satellite altimetry data, and morphological changes over the last decade were assessed. Under the worst-case 25% intensity increase by 2150, model simulations indicate a substantial expansion of flooded areas across southeastern Sicily-exceeding 2.8 km 2-with the most vulnerable wetland systems experiencing an increase of nearly two orders of magnitude compared to the present-day scenario, and localized erosion magnitudes potentially exceeding 10 m. These values are higher than any observed during medicane events in recent decades.