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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.

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.

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.

A recent archaeological discovery on Vivara, the small islet next to Procida (Campania region, Italy), has documented the prehistoric use of finely crushed obsidian fragments as abrasive powder for polishing wooden artifacts. These fragments originated from a local deposit known as Breccia Museowhose exploitation in prehistoric times had not been previously attested-and were found mixed with obsidian tools sourced from other well-known Italian deposits widely used throughout prehistory. To develop effective methods for discriminating obsidian provenance, as required in this case, we carried out geochemical, isotopic, and mineralogical analyses on obsidian samples collected from the Breccia Museo outcrop at Punta della Lingua (~4 km NE of Vivara), one of the richest and most accessible deposit on Procida Island. The results were compared with those obtained from Breccia Museo obsidians from other local (Campi Flegrei) outcrops, as well as with reference samples from the major obsidian sources exploited in the Central-Western Mediterranean during prehistory (Monte Arci, Palmarola, Lipari, and Pantelleria). In addition, a micromorphological and microanalytical study was performed to identify further distinctive features useful for recognizing Breccia Museo obsidian across different archaeological contexts. This interdisciplinary investigation highlights the potential of combining relatively rapid major/minor element analyses, mineralogical and morphological characterization, with more time-consuming but highly precise isotopic measurements (87 Sr/ 86 Sr, 143 Nd/ 144 Nd) to achieve robust provenance discrimination.

In the Central Apennines (Italy), the most updated reliable 3D geological models of the crust in the area affected by the 2016-17 Amatrice-Visso-Norcia seismic sequence highlighted that the coseismic rupture at the surface can involve old inherited normal faults, while the seismogenic sources lay at depth, possibly reactivating and inverting previous thrust faults, as in the case of the Mw 6.5 Norcia earthquake (30 October 2016). Here, we present a 2D gravity model across the Central Apennines to complete and confirm the crustal geometries resulting from the 3D model itself. The cross-section was built by integrating different data types, including surface geology, hydrocarbon wells, seismic profiles, and results from receiver function analysis. It was then checked against gravity anomalies and the velocity distribution from Local Earthquake Tomography (LET), adding further details, and, finally, against seismicity recorded during the 2016-2017 sequence. The results substantiate the reliability of the geometries proposed in the RETRACE-3D model, as they fit well, except for some local misfits, with other independent data, such as the Bouguer anomalies and the velocity distribution from LET. Furthermore, integrating different data types allowed us to provide a detailed description of the structural setting of the Apennine chain and the surroundings of the RETRACE-3D study area and to identify some new features at seismogenic depths beyond those typically targeted in hydrocarbon exploration. In particular, we were able to investigate the nature of the basement top and its relationship with seismotectonics. Plain language summary: Specific knowledge of the Earth's crust structures and our ability to image them in three dimensions are crucial for improving the understanding of the tectonic processes, particularly those responsible for generating earthquakes. The RETRACE-3D project produced a 3D model of the crust down to depths of 5-10 km in the area of the Central Apennines hit by the 2016-2017 seismic sequence. In this study, we analysed the gravity anomalies along a 2D cross-section to validate these results and to extend our knowledge to the surrounding areas and greater depths. Gravity anomalies make it possible to detect density variations within the crust, which can be related to the presence of specific geological units. Our analysis validated the RETRACE-3D project findings and provided insights into the nature of the upper crust at the base of the sedimentary succession. In particular, we identified an ancient (Permian-Triassic) sedimentary body, whose presence and current position appear to be closely related to the seismotectonics of the area.

This study presents an updated version of TISER-GCN, a graph neural network (GCN) designed to predict maximum intensity measurements (IMs) from 10-second seismic waveforms starting at the earthquake origin time, without prior knowledge of location, distance, and magnitude. The improved model was applied to nearly 600 seismic stations from the INSTANCE benchmark dataset, significantly expanding the original TISER-GCN setup, which was limited to 39 stations in a smaller area of central Italy. Input data consist of three-component waveforms selected to ensure high quality and minimize saturation. Results show that masking stations where the P-wave arrives within the first 10 seconds , combined with the integration of additional information, reduces the mean squared error (MSE) by up to 6% for peak ground acceleration (PGA) and 5.5% for peak ground velocity (PGV), compared to the unmasked baseline. Moreover, the proposed approach yields near-zero median residuals across all IMs, mitigating the systematic underestimation observed when using a ground motion model specifically developed for Italy. These findings indicate that the model provides accurate predictions of ground motions, comparable to those obtained with the original TISER-GCN, which, however, requires a fixed seismic network geometry.

This study presents an integrated geophysical–geomatic approach for the investigation of archaeological sites, combining low-frequency Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) and close-range photogrammetry at the Archaeological Park of Abellinum (southern Italy). Unlike conventional applications using high-frequency antennas, the low-frequency GPR system employed in this study enabled deep subsurface imaging, allowing reconstruction of buried stratigraphic and architectural features to depths of several metres. This enhanced penetration capacity facilitated a more comprehensive understanding of the investigated environments, by complementing rather than replacing high-frequency surveys and expanding the interpretable volume in complex urban and peri-urban contexts. GPR reflection data were integrated with high-resolution photogrammetric surface models, enabling direct comparison between visible structures and subsurface geometries. The combined dataset provided precise correlations between surface features and subsurface anomalies, demonstrating the potential of this integrated methodology for detailed archaeological interpretation. Overall, this approach offers a scalable, non-invasive framework applicable to other complex archaeological landscapes, supporting both research objectives and long-term heritage management. By systematically combining low-frequency GPR with high-resolution photogrammetry, the study introduces a methodological contribution that extends interpretative depth well beyond the limits of conventional surveys.