Puglisi, Giuseppe

Volcanic crisis exercises are usually run to test response capabilities, communication protocols, and decision-making procedures by agencies with responsibilities to cope with scenarios of volcanic unrest with inherent uncertainty, such as volcano observatories and/or civil protection authorities. During the last decades, the use of questionnaires has been increased to evaluate people’s knowledge on volcanic hazards and their perception of risk, to better understand their preparedness to respond to emergency measures plans. In this paper, we present a study carried out within the European Network of Observatories and Research Infrastructures for Volcanology project (EUROVOLC) focused on extracting information on the experience gained during volcanic-crisis exercises by the project’s participants and beyond. An open-ended question questionnaire was firstly distributed for a survey within the project community. Through the results obtained, we developed a user-friendly online multi-choice questionnaire that was submitted to the volcanological communities within and outside EUROVOLC. Analyzing the answers to the online questionnaire, we extracted a prototype checklist for guiding the design of such exercises in the future. Our results confirm this type of survey as a very useful tool for gathering information on participants’ experience and knowledge, able to understand which data and information may be useful when designing exercises for scientists, emergency managers and decision makers. In particular, the main lessons learnt regard the need i) to increase training activities involving people exposed to volcanic hazards and media, ii) to improve external communication tools (between players and public/media), equipment and protocols and iii) to better define decision-makers’ needs.

Recent decades have highlighted the increasing need to connect and strengthen the volcanology community at European level. Indeed, research in the volcanology field is highly qualified in Europe and the volcano monitoring infrastructures have achieved valuable know-how, becoming the state-of-the-art in the world. However, the lack of common good practices in sciences and technologies, missing standards, as well as a significant fragmentation of the community requires coordination to move forward and guarantee a trans-national harmonisation. The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) represented the first opportunity to initiate this process of coordination by encouraging the creation of a European volcanological scientific infrastructure for data and service sharing. During the preparation and the design of EPOS, the volcanology community identified the objectives and the needs of the community building, the services to be provided and the work plan to implement the infrastructure. To achieve this aim, the contribution from three European projects FUTUREVOLC, MED-SUV and EUROVOLC was essential. This paper presents the main steps performed during the last years for building the community and implementing the infrastructure. This paper also describes the strategic choices and actions taken to realise the infrastructure such as the establishment of the Volcano Observation Thematic Core Service (TCS), whose structure and activity are described.

Transnational access (TNA) allows cross-border, short-term and frequently free-of-charge access to world-class research facilities, to foster collaborations and exchanges of experience. Specifically, TNA aims to encourage open science and innovation and to increase the efficient and effective use of scientific infrastructure. Within EPOS, the European Plate Observing System, the Volcano Observatories and Multi-scale Laboratories communities have offered TNA to their high-quality research facilities through national and European funding. This experience has allowed the definition, design, and testing of procedures and activities needed to provide transnational access inn the EPOS context. In this paper, the EPOS community describes the main objectives for the provision of transnational access in the EPOS framework, based on previous experiences. It includes practical procedures for managing transnational access from a legal, governance, and financial perspective, and proposes logistical and technical solutions to effectively execute transnational access activities. In addition, it provides an outlook on the inclusion of new thematic communities within the TNA framework, and addresses the challenges of providing market-driven access to industry.

Space techniques based on GPS and SAR interferometry allow measuringmillimetric ground deformations. Achieving such accuracy means removing atmospheric anomalies that frequently affect volcanic areas by modeling the tropospheric delays. Due to the prominent orography and the high spatial and temporal variability of weather conditions, the active volcano Mt. Etna (Italy) is particularly suitableto carry out research aimed at estimating and filtering atmospheric effects on GPS and DInSAR grounddeformation measurements. The aim of this work is to improve the accuracy of the ground deformation measurements by modeling the tropospheric delays at Mt. Etna volcano. To this end, data from the monitoring network of 29 GPS permanent stations and MODIS multispectral satellite data series are used to reproduce the tropospheric delays affecting interferograms. A tomography algorithm has been developed to reproduce the wet refractivityfield over Mt. Etna in 3D, starting from the slant tropospheric delays calculated by GPS in all the stations of the network. The developed algorithm has been tested on a synthetic atmospheric anomaly. The test confirms the capability of the software to faithfully reconstruct the simulated anomaly. With the aim of applying this algorithm to real cases, we introduce the water vapor contentmeasured by the MODIS instrument on board Terra and Aqua satellites. The use of such data,although limited by cloud cover, provides a two-fold benefit: it improves the tomographic resolution and adds feedback for the GPS wet delay measurements. A cross-comparison between GPS and MODIS water vapor measurements for thefirst time shows a fair agreement between those indirect measurements on an entire year of data (2015). The tomography algorithm was applied on selected real cases to correct the Sentinel-1 DInSAR interferograms acquired over Mt. Etna during 2015. Indeed, the corrected interferograms show that the differential path delay reaches 0.1 m (i.e. 3 C-band fringes) in ground deformation, demonstrating how the atmospheric anomaly affects precision and reliability of DInSAR space-based techniques. The real cases show that the tomography is often able to capturethe atmospheric effect at the large scale and correct interferograms, although in limited areas. Furthermore, the introduction of MODIS data significantly improves by ∼80% voxel resolution at the critical layer (1,000 m). Further improvements will be suitable for monitoring active volcanoes worldwide.

On December 24th, Mt. Etna volcano underwent a seismic crisis beneath the summit and upper southern flank of the volcano, accompanied by significant ash emission. Eruptive fissures opened at the base of summit craters, propagating SE‐wards. This lateral eruption lasted until December 27th. Despite the small eruption, seismic swarm and ground deformation were very strong. Sentinel‐1 interferograms show a wide and intense ground deformation with some additional features related to volcano‐tectonic structures. We inverted DInSAR data to characterise the magma intrusion. The resulting model indicates that a large dyke intruded but aborted its upraise at about the sea level; however, this big intrusion stretched the edifice, promoting the opening of the eruptive fissures fed by a shallower small dyke, and activating also several faults. This model highlights that a big intrusion beneath a structurally complex volcano represents a main issue even if the eruption is aborted.

Recent studies have focused on the capability of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) instruments to detect volcanic plumes by means of either variation in signal-to-noise ratio or products from positioning processing. These new approaches can be extremely useful for volcanoes worldwide, which may not have advanced monitoring systems or during bad weather conditions when other techniques may fail. In this letter, we show how the GNSS stations can provide a new tool to locate the volcanic crater during highly explosive events. The proposed method has been tested on the lava fountains at Mt. Etna (Italy) that has characterized most of the eruptive activity from different craters since 2011. Our results confirm that not only there are evidences of detectable interaction between volcanic plumes and GNSS data but also, for the first time on a large data set, we are able to discriminate the erupting crater with great precision.

The southeastern flank of Etna volcano slides into the Ionian Sea at rates of centimeters per year. The prevailing understanding is that pressurization of the magmatic system, and not gravitational forces, controls flank movement, although this has also been proposed. So far, it has not been possible to separate between these processes, because no data on offshore deformation were available until we conducted the first long-term seafloor displacement monitoring campaign from April 2016 until July 2017. Unprecedented seafloor geodetic data reveal a >4-cm slip along the offshore extension of a fault related to flank kinematics during one 8-day-long event in May 2017, while displacement on land peaked at ~4 cm at the coast. As deformation increases away from the magmatic system, the bulk of Mount Etna's present continuous deformation must be driven by gravity while being further destabilized by magma dynamics. We cannot exclude flank movement to evolve into catastrophic collapse, implying that Etna's flank movement poses a much greater hazard than previously thought. The hazard of flank collapse might be underestimated at other coastal and ocean island volcanoes, where the dynamics of submerged flanks are unknown.

La Politica dei Dati dell’INGV è composta da tre documenti: i principi generali, pubblicato nel febbraio 2016, e due documenti che regolano la condivisione dei risultati delle attività di ricerca, il primo dedicato alle pubblicazioni scientifiche e pubblicato nel luglio 2017, il secondo dedicato ai dati scientifici e pubblicato nel luglio 2018. La stesura dei testi fu affidata dal Presidente dell’INGV a un gruppo di lavoro a composizione mista (ricercatori, tecnologi, bibliotecari, avvocati, esperti di comunicazione, amministrativi). Le bozze furono discusse con il Presidente, i Direttori dei tre Dipartimenti tematici (Terremoti, Vulcani, Ambiente) e i Direttori delle varie Sezioni in cui è suddiviso geograficamente l’INGV. Le versioni finali dei documenti sono infine state approvate dal Consiglio di Amministrazione.

This paper presents the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) enabling two European GEO Geohazard Supersites in Italy. According to GEO (Group on Earth Observation) vision, Geohazard Supersites provide access to spaceborne and in-situ geophysical data and models for selected sites prone to natural hazards –noticeably, earthquakes and volcano eruptions. The VRE was implemented in the framework of the Mediterranean Supersite Volcanoes (MED-SUV) project, funded by the European Commission. MED-SUV realized one of the European supersite demonstrators covering the two Permanent Supersites selected in Italy: Mt. Etna and Campi Flegrei/Vesuvius. The MED-SUV VRE provides advanced services for heterogeneous data and information management and sharing. MED-SUV started identifying the main supersite requirements including: the interoperability with existing data/information supply systems, the support of policy-based access control, the access to processing capabilities provided by external platforms, the management resources for publishing and sharing new products, the integration with significant global systems such as GEOSS and EPOS. MED-SUV adopted a System of Systems (SoS) approach to address interoperability with the identified heterogeneous systems supplying data and information. The SoS approach is based on a brokering architecture, where a specialized component (i.e the MED-SUV Broker: MSB) connects the existing and next-coming data sources leaving them autonomous. MSB carries out all the necessary mediation and harmonization tasks exposing standard interfaces enabling the interconnection with external systems like GEOSS and EPOS. In addition, MSB is accessible via a JavaScript library implementing Web APIs to facilitate the development of Web and mobile applications.

Persistent motion of the south flank of Kilauea Volcano, Hawai'i, has been known for several decades, but has only recently been identified at other large basaltic volcanoes-namely Piton de la Fournaise (La Reunion) and Etna (Sicily)-thanks to the advent of space geodetic techniques. Nevertheless, understanding of long-term flank instability is based largely on the example of Kilauea, despite the large differences in the manifestations and mechanisms of the process when viewed through a comparative lens. For example, the rate of flank motion at Kilauea is several times that of Etna and Piton de la Fournaise and is accommodated on a slip plane several km deeper than is probably present at the other two volcanoes. Gravitational spreading also appears to be the dominant driving force at Kilauea, given the long-term steady motion of the volcano's south flank regardless of eruptive/intrusive activity, whereas magmatic activity plays a larger role in flank deformation at Etna and Piton de la Fournaise. Kilauea and Etna, however, are both characterized by heavily faulted flanks, while Piton de la Fournaise shows little evidence for flank faulting. A helpful means of understanding the spectrum of persistent flank motion at large basaltic edifices may be through a framework defined on one hand by magmatic activity (which encompasses both magma supply and edifice size), and on the other hand by the structural setting of the volcano (especially the characteristics of the subvolcanic basement or subhorizontal intravolcanic weak zones). A volcano's size and magmatic activity will dictate the extent to which gravitational and magmatic forces can drive motion of an unstable flank (and possibly the level of faulting of that flank), while the volcano's structural setting governs whether or not a plane of weakness exists beneath or within the edifice and can facilitate flank slip. Considering persistent flank instability using this conceptual model is an alternative to using a single volcano as a "type example"-especially given that the example is usually Kilauea, which defines an extreme end of the spectrum-and can provide a basis for understanding why flank motion may or may not exist on other large basaltic volcanoes worldwide.