Acquiring, archiving, analyzing and exchanging seismic data in real time at the Seismological Research Center of the OGS in Italy

Abstract

After the 1976 Friuli earthquake (Ms = 6.5) in north-eastern Italy that caused about 1,000 casualties and widespread destruction in the Friuli area, the Italian government established the Centro di Ricerche Sismologiche (CRS). This is now a department of the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS), and it is specifically devoted to the monitoring of the seismicity of north-eastern Italy. Since its inception, the North-East Italy Seismic Network has grown enormously. Currently, it consists of 14 broad-band and 20 short-period seismic stations, all of which are telemetered to and acquired in real time at the OGS-CRS data center in Udine. Data exchange agreements in place with other Italian, Slovenian, Austrian and Swiss seismological institutes lead to a total number of 94 seismic stations acquired in real time, which confirms that the OGS is the reference institute for seismic monitoring of north-eastern Italy. Since 2002, CRS has been using the Antelope software suite as the main tool for collecting, analyzing, archiving and exchanging seismic data. SeisComP is also used as a real-time data exchange server tool. A customized web accessible server is used to manually relocate earthquakes, and automatic procedures have been set-up for moment-tensor determination, shaking-map computation, web publishing of earthquake parametric data, waveform drumplots, state-of-health parameters, and quality checks of the station by spectra analysis. Scripts for email/SMS/fax alerting to public institutions have also been customized. Recently, a real-time seismology website was designed and set-up (http://rts.crs.inogs.it/).