SISMIKO: INGV operational task force for rapid deployment of seismic network during earthquake emergencies

Abstract

The National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia), is an italian public research institute established in 1999. Since its inception, the mission of INGV included seismic surveillance and earthquake monitoring in Italy. INGV is part of the Civil Defence system (Margheriti et al., 2021). INGV has offices in different parts of Italy and operates the Italian National Seismic Network (Rete Sismica Nazionale—RSN; INGV Seismological Data Centre, 2006) and other networks at national scale (Michelini et al., 2017). INGV also operates a temporary seismic network infrastructure, a pool of instruments used to densify seismic networks for scientific experiments or in response to damaging earthquakes and to increase monitoring capabilities during seismic sequences. SISMIKO is the operational task force of INGV whose core purpose is to rapidly deploy temporary seismic stations in response to moderate—large magnitude earthquakes or in areas where a seismic sequence is causing concerns and/or scientific interest (Moretti et al., 2016). By reducing the spatial distance between the seismic stations, temporary deployments can improve the RSN detection capability and the accuracy of the earthquake locations. SISMIKO was established in 2015 by Lucia Margheriti and Milena Moretti, so they became responsible for INGV emergency deployments of the temporary networks. SISMIKO involves INGV technicians and researchers from all over Italy, from Milano to Catania (see acknowledgments), grouped together by common interest technical and scientific issues. SISMIKO coordinates all INGV groups working on seismic emergencies (Figure 1). The data acquired by the SISMIKO temporary networks, are made available to the scientific community, without any restrictions, via italian node of the European Integrated Data Archive portal (EIDA1; Danecek et al., 2021). Datasets are archived in near real-time in the “Standard for the Exchange of Earthquake Data (SEED)” format and have an associated Digital Object Identifier (DOI). The data are used for monitoring, surveillance and for scientific research. Since its establishment, SISMIKO has installed seven temporary seismic networks, including the one used to monitor the 2016–2018 seismic sequence in central Italy (Moretti et al., 2016). The most recent activations of SISMIKO were in May and November 2022: Chianti-Fiorentino (Piccinini et al., 2022; 2023) and North Marche coast (D’Alema et al., 2022b), respectively. The following section briefly describes the history of the INGV emergency mobile network.