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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.

This work introduces the Seismic Data Quality (SDQ) project, an open-source Python tool package designed to evaluate the performance of co-located accelerometric and velocimetric stations, assess data quality, and support technicians in the seismic surveillance room at the Rome headquarters. SDQ conducts these verifications through analyses of seismic events and continuous data streams. For earthquake data, SDQ compares ground motion parameters from co-located sensors, subsequently classifying waveforms into quality classes. Continuous data verification relies on ambient noise streams and quality metrics, such as percentage gap, data availability, root-mean-square, and power spectral density. The SDQ tool was tested using data from 200 stations of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Italy), each with six channels, within the National Seismic Network, analysing over 15,000 waveforms from Italian earthquakes with local or moment magnitudes (M L and/or M W) ≥ 3.5 and hypocentral distances (R ipo) ≤ 150 km, recorded from 2012 to 2023. Earthquake data and station metadata are sourced from the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks web services (https://terremoti.ingv.it/webservices_and_software). Continuous data analyses utilise daily miniSEED recordings from each station, classifying waveforms into quality categories based on various metrics. SDQ generates summary tables, images, and explanatory text files for both seismic events and continuous data. SDQ is available for download at https://gitlab.rm.ingv.it/EIDA/quality/sdq.

We present new national and regional seismic noise models for Italy based on continuous vertical-component recordings acquired between January 2024 and February 2025 at 349 broadband seismic stations. A rigorous quality-control and dataselection workflow was developed to identify station malfunctions, metadata inconsistencies, data gaps, and earthquake-related seismic transients using conservative empirical magnitude-hypocentral-distance criteria. After quality assessment, 283 stations were retained for the model construction. The Italian Seismic Noise Model (ISNM) was derived by equally stacking normalized station-level probability density functions (PDFs), with the 5th (P 5) and 95th (P 95) percentiles defining its lower and upper boundaries. Compared with the previous Italian model, the ISNM defines a narrower spectral envelope, with its lower boundary averaging 4.1 dB higher and its upper boundary 11.9 dB lower over their common frequency range. Sensitivity analyses show differences within approximately ±1.5 dB below 10 Hz between models obtained with and without data selection, whereas quality control substantially reduces

The May 2024 Mother's Day superstorm offers a rare opportunity to document the global ionospheric response to an extreme geomagnetic disturbance using ground-based ionosonde observations. Here, we present and describe a manually validated dataset of the F2-layer ordinary critical frequency (foF2) observations recorded by 38 ionosonde stations distributed across high, mid, and low latitudes from 10 to 14 May 2024, covering both the main and recovery phases of the storm. The dataset was produced through a careful inspection and validation of individual ionograms, overcoming limitations of automatic scaling procedures that can become particularly unreliable during disturbed ionospheric conditions. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such a large collection of foF2 observations has been compiled for an extreme event such as the May 2024 Mother's Day superstorm. The availability of this validated foF2 dataset provides a high-quality benchmark for investigating storm-time ionospheric dynamics, assessing ionosonde autoscaling performance, and evaluating empirical and assimilative ionospheric models under extreme space-weather forcing.