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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.

Mt. Etna volcano, which is located at Sicily's eastern coast, slowly slides into the Mediterranean Sea. This process is likely caused by gravity and tectonic forces as well as magmatic activity. To better understand the volcano's sliding, we built 3D computer models of the volcano by considering its main geological features. Because of the volcano's high level of magmatic activity, it is difficult to distinguish the contributions of gravitational forces, magmatic intrusions, and other secondary mechanisms to flank sliding. We therefore focused in our models on the effects of gravitational spreading and main tectonic structures. When comparing the model results to actual GPS data, we found that ductile rock parameter values lead to a best fit. The results improved further when fluid volumes beneath the flank were included.

We present a comprehensive dataset of 920 coordinates and 509 velocities for geodetic points in central Greece and the Peloponnese, an area characterised by intense tectonic deformation. The points, with observation periods within the 1990–2024 range, are organised into three categories: permanent stations, triangulation pillars, and markers. The latter two categories are subdivided according to whether or not they feature self-centring. Most of the triangulation pillars belong to the Greek national network originally surveyed in the 1960s–70s. The GNSS data were processed using the GIPSY 6.4 software. To assess the secular velocities, we corrected for co-seismic and post-seismic displacements using earthquake parameters constrained by the time series of the permanent stations. Self-centring systems improve precision, reducing the average horizontal coordinate residual variability from 6.15 to 4.45 mm. The velocity uncertainties stabilise below 0.15 mm yr−1 when the time series exceed twenty years. Points with self-centring achieve 0.2 mm yr−1 accuracy after twelve years of data, compared to twenty years for those without self-centring. After twenty-five years, campaign points observed eight to ten times match the precision of permanent stations. The velocities at the campaign points further validate the HELVEL model previously developed using permanent stations only. We calculate a seven-parameter transformation from the original coordinates of 424 triangulation pillars to their GNSS-based ITRF2020 coordinates at epoch 2020.0. The lowest mean scatter after the transformation is 0.134 m when 1965 is used as the mean epoch for the triangulation data. We then apply this transformation to all 9,729 pillars of the study area. At the 424 resurveyed pillars, the GNSS ellipsoidal heights agree with the sum of the levelled heights and the official HG2023 geoid heights to within 0.184 m root-mean-square. Our dataset is entirely referenced to ITRF2020 at epoch 2020.0, which enables interoperability with previous and future geodetic studies. Dense campaign point arrays are critical for resolving the strain distribution at the scale of individual active faults, beyond the reach of arrays of permanent stations alone.

Il contributo illustra i passi salienti compiuti dall’Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) lungo il percorso condiviso dalla Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) durante il primo anno di attività del gruppo di lavoro dedicato (2024-2025). Sono riassunti i principi di base dell'accordo sulla riforma della valutazione e le prime riflessioni del personale a riguardo, raccolte attraverso un semplice questionario. Infine, vengono sollevate alcune considerazioni da una prospettiva di genere, ricollegandosi alle percentuali delle componenti maschile e femminile nei vari ruoli e profili e sollevati alcuni interrogativi sui fattori che rendono più lenta la progressione di carriera della componente femminile.