The velocity field of the Italian area

Abstract

The rapid development of several permanent GNSS networks in Italy has made available a huge amount of GNSS observations, giving the chance to figure out and significantly improve the spatial and temporal resolutions of the crustal deformation in the Italian area. More than 20 GNSS networks, promoted and managed by different institutions, constitute the grid of monitoring stations that includes over 1000 permanent stations, mainlydevoted to real-time positioning services but that has proven to be suitable for monitoring slow deforming processes, such as for instance, intraplate deformation processes. The whole set of raw GPS data is routinely processed at INGV providing daily solutions of station coordinates and estimating linear velocities for each station. The information content of coordinate time series is wide, the station position variations incorporate linear and non-linear effects caused by geophysical phenomena of different nature, of which we show some evidences. The sectors where the permanent network is augmented with non-permanent sites allows to study tectonic processes with a finer resolution.