The Broad-Band Seismometric Network of North-Eastern Italy

SCIENTIFIC STAFF: CRS staff
RESPONSIBLE SCIENTIST: CRS Director
Centro Ricerche Sismologiche, Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e Geofisica Sperimentale, Cussignacco (UD) e Sgonico (TS)

The broad-band seismometric network of North-Eastern Italy (Fig. 1) is managed within a collaboration among OGS, the Geoscience Department (DST) of the Trieste University, and the Civil Protections of Friuli Venezia Giulia and Veneto Regions. This network includes a total of 17 stations: 11 are managed by OGS, 4 by DST, and the remaining 2 by both Institutions.

Figure 1. Map of the Broad-Band Seismometric Network of North-Eastern Italy.

All the stations are installed in good-quality, low-noise sites (Fig. 2); they are equipped with both a broad-band seismometer and an accelerometer (Fig. 3); and are connected in real-time with the acquisition centers. Station TRI has been a node of WWSSN (World Wide Standardised Seismographic Network) and is also part of the Mediterranean Very Broad-Band Seismographic Network (MEDNET.)

Figure 2. Maintenance of the broad-band station of M. Acomizza (code ACOM).


Figure 3. Broad-band seismometer and accelerometer of station Cimolais (code CIMO).

As a result of the INTERREG III A Italy/Austria EU Project entitled “Trans-national Seismological networks in the Southeastern Alps”, the Broad-Band Seismometric Network of North-Eastern Italy is tightly connected to the seismic networks of Austria (managed by the Zentralanstalt für Meterologie und Geodynamik - ZAMG, Wien) and Slovenia (managed by the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje - ARSO, Urad za Seizmologijo, Ljubljana) in order to ensure a more effective and rapid exchange of all the available seismological information ---waveforms and parametric data--- among the scientific institutions and the Civil Protection Agencies. The seismological instrumentation (accelerometric, short-period and broad-band) managed by these institutions has been merged into a unique virtual network. Data from the entire network are collected in near real time at five “peer” data centers established in Udine (Italy), Trieste (Italy), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Vienna (Austria), and Palmanova (Italy) at the emergency room of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Civil Protection (Fig. 4).

Figure 4. Data centers of the trans-national seismological network.

Data acquisition and storage is based on the BRTT Antelope software package. Each partner acquires signals directly from its own field data loggers and exchanges data with the other partners in near real time through the Internet by means of the “orb2orb” Antelope program (Fig. 5).

Figure 5. Data flow at CRS for the trans-national seismological network.

All the short-period and broad band stations managed by CRS enter in the data exchange. According to the scheme in Fig. 5, broadband data are acquired by the Antelope system directly from the data loggers using programs available with the package (“qt2orb” and “q3302orb” in Fig. 5. For the short-period stations, a special interface has been implemented based on the public domain software package SeisComP distributed by ORFEUS (Observatories and Research Facilities for EUropean Seismology) for the MEREDIAN project. To increase the reliability of the monitoring system, the acquisition system runs on a cluster of two computers with external disk arrays in a mirror configuration.