The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) is an Italian research institution, with focus on Earth Sciences. INGV runs the Italian National Seismic Network (Rete Sismica Nazionale, RSN) and other networks at national scale for monitoring earthquakes and tsunami as a part of the National Civil Protection System coordinated by the Italian Department of Civil Protection (Dipartimento di Protezione Civile, DPC).
RSN is composed of about 400 stations, mainly broadband, installed in the Country and in the surrounding regions; about 110 stations feature also co-located strong motion instruments, and about 180 have GPS receivers and belong to the National GPS network (Rete Integrata Nazionale GPS, RING).
The data acquisition system was designed to accomplish, in near-real-time, automatic earthquake detection, hypocenter and magnitude determination, moment tensors, shake maps and other products of interest for DPC. Database archiving of all parametric results are closely linked to the existing procedures of the INGV seismic monitoring environment and surveillance procedures. INGV is one of the primary nodes of ORFEUS (Observatories & Research Facilities for European Seismology) EIDA (European Integrated Data Archive) for the archiving and distribution of continuous, quality checked seismic data. The strong motion network data are archived and distributed both in EIDA and in event based archives; GPS data, from the RING network are also archived, analyzed and distributed at INGV.
Overall, the Italian earthquake surveillance service provides, in quasi real-time, hypocenter parameters to the DPC. These are then revised routinely by the analysts of the Italian Seismic Bulletin (Bollettino Sismico Italiano, BSI). The results are published on the web, these are available to both the scientific community and the general public. The INGV surveillance includes a pre-operational tsunami alert service since INGV is one of the Tsunami Service providers of the North-eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Tsunami warning System (NEAMTWS).
The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) is an important
Italian public research institution (
INGV is the reference institution of the Italian Department of Civil Protection (Dipartimento di Protezione Civile, DPC), and is part of the National Civil Protection System. It is in charge of the surveillance of the seismicity and volcanic activity of the entire national territory through state-of-the-art instrumental networks covering Italy and concentrated around the main active volcanoes.
The signals recorded by these networks are transmitted in real-time to the
INGV is also a constituent of the Italian tsunami warning system (Sistema Nazionale Allerta Maremoto, SiAM) and since recently tsunami service provides (TSP) of the North-Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Tsunami Warning System (NEAMTWS, next to operational, at the moment of writing this manuscript).
Here we describe the various networks, databases and monitoring products of the National Earthquake Center (Centro Nazionale Terremoti, CNT, one of the organizational units of INGV) and, concisely, the earthquake and tsunami surveillance systems at INGV Rome.
INGV operates several permanent and mobile networks, deployed over the entire Italian territory. Such networks produce a large amount of observational data feeding both scientific and surveillance activities. The instrumental networks monitor all the relevant geophysical parameters for the National and local Civil Protection systems and, at the same time, represent the foundation of virtually all research activities carried on by scientists to address the complex geodynamics of Italy and neighboring regions both locally and regionally. These networks comprise the main infrastructure managed by INGV, and focus the majority of its financial and human resources.
The CNT, has been in charge of developing and maintaining the national networks for the last 30 years, ensuring continuous technological update, increase of the quality and the quantity of the sensors and the improvement of data transmission and of the preprocessing performances.
The National Seismic Network (Rete Sismica Nazionale, RSN; Amato and Mele,
2008) counts about 400 state-of-art seismic stations equipped with
3-component velocimeters ranging from (very) broadband to short period
(Fig. 1;
The Italian seismic network, RSN, dark blue triangles are the stations belonging to IV and MN networks directly owned and managed by INGV, light blue triangles are stations owned and managed by other national and international institutions that contribute to the INGV surveillance system. Red small triangles indicate stations equipped with accelerometers.
A site of the RSN-RING networks equipped with broad-band velocimeter, accelerometer and GPS antenna.
The CNT, has installed and operates most of these stations, although a
considerable number of stations that are also contributing to the INGV
surveillance system has been installed and is maintained by other INGV
offices (Naples, Catania, Bologna, Milan, Pisa, Arezzo). INGV network has
international code IV (INGV Seismological Data Centre, 1997, Rete Sismica
Nazionale (RSN),
The Italian institutions collaborating with INGV for the RSN include the Centro di Ricerche Sismologiche (Seismological Research Center, CRS) of the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale – OGS (Italian National Institute for Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics) in Udine, “Prato Ricerche” in Prato, Osservatorio Sismico “Andrea Bina” in Perugia, several Universities: Genova Univ. (Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, dell'Ambiente e della Vita, DISTAV, in Genova), Calabria Univ. (in Cosenza), Trieste Univ. (in Trieste) and some local municipalities as Bolzano and Trento. Monitoring earthquakes in the Euro – Mediterranean region and globally is carried out by collecting real-time global data, upon bilateral agreements, from many other European and extra-European stations through centers like the Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam – Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ), the United States Geological Survey and its National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC), Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), National Observatory of Athens (NOA) and others.
Several of the seismic stations are also equipped with strong motion sensors (accelerometers) and with GPS antennas (Figs. 1, 2). The variety of instrumentation and data transmission in the RSN is detailed in Table 1. In particular, one of the digitizer widely adopted by INGV has been designed and is produced by CNT and is commonly referred as the GAIA data logger (Amato et al., 2006). This is a 24 bit Digital Acquisition System (DAS), that incorporates Linux Operating System and it is a modular, easily settable, low power and low cost DAS. It is quite compact and characterized by high connectivity.
Instrumentation – data transmission and data exchange protocols of RSN.
The important technological upgrades carried out in the last years have allowed for significant improvements of the seismic monitoring of Italy and of the Euro-Mediterranean Countries. The adopted data transmission systems include satellite, local wireless connections (UMTS, WIFI etc.) and wired lines. Mainly Seedlink protocol has been adopted for data transmission.
Many of the sites of the RSN especially in southern Italy and Sicily are
also GPS permanent recording sites of the “Rete Integrata Nazionale GPS”
(INGV RING Working Group, Rete Integrata Nazionale GPS (RING)
RING, the Italian GPS National network.
The co-location of different instruments (Fig. 2) allows us to record the entire frequency range of the deformation process that leads to earthquake occurrence, from the inter-seismic strain accumulation on faults to the radiative part during the rupture process. Almost all the stations have been installed in the free field thank to the low power consumption of the satellite transmission that can be run with solar panels. Many RING GPS remote sites transmit data at 30 s of sampling rate in real-time streaming adopting the Nanometrics LIBRA VSAT technology and using the Intelsat and Hellasat satellite systems. The satellite communication for the transmission of the geodetic signal has been chosen for its autonomy, reliability, simplicity, possibility to have high quality of data and economy. As an alternative to the satellite systems some sites are provided with Internet communication (by cable, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System – UMTS, Satellite Internet) or dedicated WiFi Mesh Network designed, implemented and maintained by the CNT engineers and technicians. These infrastructures allow us to acquire the GPS data in real-time at 1 s of sampling rate.
The data acquired continuously from seismometric, accelerometric (Mazza et
al., 2012) and GPS networks are archived at INGV following international
standards. The distribution of the continuous waveforms (velocimeter and
accelerometer signals) is done through the European Integrated seismic Data
Archive (EIDA). EIDA is a distributed and federated data center part of
ORFEUS (Observatories & Research Facilities for European Seismology)
established to securely archive seismic waveform data and related metadata,
gathered by European research infrastructures, and to provide transparent
access to the archives by the geosciences research communities (Fig. 4).
INGV is one of the primary node of the federate archive, and develops and
provides a series of web services to access, explore and download data and
metadata contained in the archive (Fig. 5). EIDA nodes are data centers
which collect and archive data from seismic networks. Networks contributing
data to EIDA are listed in the ORFEUS EIDA network list (
EIDA access portal to the seismic data.
INGV web services at
Surveillance, operational room in Rome.
The current EIDA nodes are: KNMI/ORFEUS Data Center, (ODC)/Netherlands, GEOFON/GFZ/Germany, SED/ETHZ/Switzerland, RESIF/INSU-CNRS/France, INGV/Italy, NIEP/Romania, KOERI/Turkey, BGR/Germany, NOA/Greece, IPGP/France and LMU/Germany. Other European institutions contribute with their data archives to EIDA in a continuous collaboration between institutions.
The seismometric and strong motion network data are also archived and
distributed through event based archives as the Italian Seismological
Instrumental and parametric Data-base (ISIDe working group, 2016), the
Italian Accelerometric Archive (ITACA working group, 2016), the Engineering
Strong-Motion database (ESM working group, 2015) and INGV Strong Motion Data
(ISMD,
GPS data, from the RING network are archived, analyzed and distributed at
INGV, and can be found at
The INGV seismic monitoring system provides prompt and reliable earthquake
locations and magnitudes occurring in Italy and surrounding areas (Amato and
Mele, 2008), and accurate estimates in the Mediterranean Basin and worldwide
(Bernardi et al., 2015). The data recorded by the monitoring networks are
transmitted in real-time to the operational rooms in Rome, Naples and
Catania, where highly trained
The seismic data flow continuously, with maximum delays of a few seconds,
into the INGV acquisition system in Rome, where several automatic procedures,
availing of the Earthworm software package (Mele et al., 2010 and references
therein) allow for the near real-time detection of local and distant
earthquakes, their locations and magnitudes and the creation of reports and
maps (including shake maps, e.g.
Earthquakes from abroad are also examined and promptly notified to the DPC
(i.e.,
As an example of the operational activities, during 2014 more than 27 000
earthquakes have been located in Italy and surrounding areas. Slightly less
than 800 earthquakes have been notified according to the procedure outlined
above to DPC (i.e.,
Similarly, notifications regarding 96 global earthquakes above 6.0 in magnitude have been produced.
Earthquake parameters of the events recorded by the RSN and located by the
INGV monitoring center in Rome, are readily available on the web page
In 2013, the Tsunami Warning Centre (Centro Allerta Tsunami, CAT)
was established at the INGV headquarters in Rome. CAT is an internal
structure of INGV with the tasks of developing the Italian Tsunami Service
Provider (TSP) and of assessing the National Tsunami Hazard Map. In 2014,
the required software and the data acquisition systems were prototyped,
engineered and implemented. Concurrently, about 80 persons, among
researchers and technicians, have been trained to fulfill the new
INGV receives real-time seismic data, recorded by about 400 stations
distributed worldwide, through several institutions (GFZ, NOA, CENtre
d'Alerte aux Tsunamis-CENALT, IRIS, NEIC, INGV). Seismic data are
continuously and automatically analyzed by Early-Est, a software jointly
developed by ALomax Scientific and INGV (Bernardi et al., 2015 and
references therein;
INGV also receives in (quasi) real-time sea level data recorded by hundreds of tide-gauges distributed worldwide through the Sea Level Monitoring Facility of IOC. In addition, the Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale (ISPRA, the institution managing and operating the Italian National Mareographic Network) sends to INGV the sea level data of their stations distributed along the coast of Italy. These data can be analyzed by the tsunami expert on duty to confirm (or cancel) the tsunami alert messages issued previously.
Since the end of 2014 several hundreds of
The Italian national seismic network is part of the earthquake and tsunami
monitoring and surveillance systems of the INGV. An efficient and rapid
real-time monitoring system, producing epicenter, Ml, shake maps etc., is
fundamental for the Italian DPC to lead the rescue teams quickly to the
right place and reduce the number of fatalities in earthquake disasters. The
monitoring networks are also powerful tools for scientific research. At
international level (European and Global) real-time data sharing among
countries is improving as well as the collaboration between the various
European and International centers. INGV is a fundamental partner in two
European projects: EPOS (European Plate Observing System;
The work presented in this article does not rely on any specific data sets.
Rather this article presents primarily the activities of the INGV “Centro
Nazionale Terremoti” responsible for the acquisition and distribution of
several data sets through several databases that are either property of INGV
or they are federated to. All the relevant sources of data are either cited
in the text or accessible through the proper DOI in the references. We note
that some DBs include not only INGV data but also data from other networks as
it is detailed in the associated citations (e.g., ESM working group, 2015;
ITACA working group, 2016; INGV RING Working Group, 2016) or cited websites
(e.g.,
This article follows from the presentation given at EGU 2016, session “Improving seismic networks performances: from site selection to data integration” and the authorship therein. In addition, we thank all INGV staff (technicians, analysts, people on duty for the seismic and tsunami surveillance, colleagues from the different INGV offices), that in the last years deployed seismic stations, analyzed seismic data and developed the Italian monitoring and surveillance system. In particular, we thank Fabrizio Bernardi, Aladino Govoni, Stefano Lorito, Alessio Piatanesi and Fabrizio Romano for their fundamental contribution to the development of the tsunami alert system at INGV. This study was funded by the Italian Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri – Dipartimento della Protezione Civile (DPC). This paper does not necessarily represent DPC official opinion and policies. Edited by: D. Pesaresi Reviewed by: I. Bondar, M. Popa, and one anonymous referee