Il Centro Allerta Tsunami (CAT) dell’INGV

Abstract

The Tsunami Alert Centre of the INGV (CAT-INGV) was created with the aim of contributing to the mitigation of the risk due to tsunamis triggered by earthquakes on the Italian and Mediterranean coasts. Tsunamis of seismic origin, in addition to being the most frequent, are those that can be detected more quickly. Seismic waves, in fact, travel in the crust with a much higher speed than that of tsunami waves. With effective seismic networks connected in real time, an "Early Warning" system can be implemented, i.e. a system capable of sending an alert signal before the arrival of the tsunami waves, at least from a certain distance from the source. The CAT-INGV has two main tasks. The first one is to provide alerts to the competent authorities in the event of potential tsunamigenic earthquakes in the Mediterranean, taking into account the criteria defined by the Department of Civil Protection for this purpose. The second one consists in carrying out the necessary studies for the definition of the probabilistic danger of tsunamis for the Italian coasts, starting from those of seismic origin (Seismic Probabili-stic Tsunami Hazard Analysis, SPTHA). In this contribution the first aspect is described, while the realization of the studies on hazard at the Mediterranean scale is the subject of research described in various recent articles (Lorito et al., 2015; Grezio et al., 2017; Selva et al., 2017a; Selva et al., 2017b). The TSUMAPS-NEAM project, funded by the European Commission and concluded at the end of 2017, provided the first hazard map for the Mediterranean region and the north-east Atlantic (Basili et al., 2017).