Seismic Surveillance and Earthquake Monitoring in Italy

Abstract

The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) is an Italian research institution with focus on earth sciences. Moreover, the INGV is the operational center for seismic surveillance and earthquake monitoring in Italy and is a part of the civil protection system as a center of expertise on seismic, volcanic, and tsunami risks.INGV operates the Italian National Seismic Network and other networks at national scale and is a primary node of the European Integrated Data Archive for archiving and distributing strong‐motion and weak‐motion seismic recordings.

In the control room in Rome, INGV staff performs seismic surveillance and tsunami warning services; in Catania and Naples, the control rooms are devoted to volcanic surveillance. Volcano monitoring includes locating earthquakes in the regions around the Sicilian (Etna, Eolian Islands, and Pantelleria) and the Campanian (Vesuvius, Campi Fregrei, and Ischia) active volcanoes. The tsunami warning is based on earthquake location and magnitude (M) evaluation for moderate to large events in the Mediterranean region and also around the world.

The technologists of the institute tuned the data acquisition system to accomplish, in near real time, automatic earthquake detection, hypocenter and magnitude determination, and evaluation of several seismological products (e.g., moment tensors and ShakeMaps).

Database archiving of all parametric results is closely linked to the existing procedures of the INGV seismic surveillance environment and surveillance procedures. Earthquake information is routinely revised by the analysts of the Italian seismic bulletin.

INGV provides earthquake information to the Department of Civil Protection (Dipartimento di Protezione Civile) to the scientific community and to the public through the web and social media. We aim at illustrating different aspects of earthquake monitoring at INGV: (1) network operations; (2) organizational structure and the hardware and software used; and (3) communication, including recent developments and planned improvements.