Caravel: A New Earthworm-Based Open-Source Development for the Italian Seismic Monitoring System

Abstract

The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) is in charge of earthquake monitoring and surveillance in the Italian territory as a part of the civil protection sys- tem. Technological improvements in the last years were taken into account for devel- oping new protocols and software to upgrade all the procedures in the monitoring centers. Real-time earthquake evaluation consists of phase picks, preliminary and auto- matic hypocenters, local magnitudes and ground-motion parameters. The real-time analysis system presently in use at INGV is the starting point for a new multitier com- pound system that relies on four main components: an automatic earthquake detection and location system based on Earthworm; a new seismological relational database for parametric data; a full set of new webservices application programming interface spec- ifications to share information and provide data at the application level and; finally, a set of multiplatform interactive revision tools developed to analyze, store, use, and dis- tribute the seismic parameters in real time. These last three components are being com- pletely developed ex-novo at INGV in Rome. Such a system has been engineered to communicate with the International Federation of Digital Seismic Networks standard webservices as well as custom home-made INGV services. Through its custom embedded features Caravel will allow the INGV personnel on duty for seismic surveillance to evaluate and review all automatic estimations before they are communicated to the Italian civil protection agency and then published by external tools through e-mail, SMS, Twitter, and webpages.