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The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) is an Italian research institution with focus on earth sciences. Moreover, the INGV is the operational center for seismic surveillance and earthquake monitoring in Italy and is a part of the civil protection system as a center of expertise on seismic, volcanic, and tsunami risks.INGV operates the Italian National Seismic Network and other networks at national scale and is a primary node of the European Integrated Data Archive for archiving and distributing strong-motion and weak-motion seismic recordings. In the control room in Rome, INGV staff performs seismic surveillance and tsunami warning services; in Catania and Naples, the control rooms are devoted to volcanic surveillance. Volcano monitoring includes locating earthquakes in the regions around the Sicilian (Etna, Eolian Islands, and Pantelleria) and the Campanian (Vesuvius, Campi Fregrei, and Ischia) active volcanoes. The tsunami warning is based on earthquake location and magnitude (M) evaluation for moderate to large events in the Mediterranean region and also around the world. The technologists of the institute tuned the data acquisition system to accomplish, in near real time, automatic earthquake detection, hypocenter and magnitude determination, and evaluation of several seismological products (e.g., moment tensors and ShakeMaps). Database archiving of all parametric results is closely linked to the existing procedures of the INGV seismic surveillance environment and surveillance procedures. Earthquake information is routinely revised by the analysts of the Italian seismic bulletin. INGV provides earthquake information to the Department of Civil Protection (Dipartimento di Protezione Civile) to the scientific community and to the public through the web and social media. We aim at illustrating different aspects of earthquake monitoring at INGV: (1) network operations; (2) organizational structure and the hardware and software used; and (3) communication, including recent developments and planned improvements.

Communicating earthquake scientific information is very important in countries like Italy, where seismic sequences are frequent, seismic risk is high, and people’s perception of risk is strongly affected by fear.After the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila (central Italy), which claimed 309 casualties and triggered a long lasting dispute among scientists, journalists, citizens, including a suite of criminal and civil trials involving scientists and civil protection officers, the scientific and risk communication in Italy (not only on earthquakes) was facing a crossroad. The first choice (feared at that time by many reporters) was to minimize or even elude public communication, in order to avoid misunderstandings and involvement in litigations. The second possibility was to increase the efforts in public communication, getting closer to citizens. INGV definitely opted for the second choice. In the past ten years the INGVterremoti platform has augmented and differentiated its activities on the web and social media, substantially increasing the number of involved people, which amounts today to several hundreds thousand. The platform consists of a coordinated suite of social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and a blog (on wordpress), where we publish both updating during earthquake sequences and scientific topics. Our end users are mostly citizens, but also media and authorities. Our tweets on earthquake activity are often in the first pages of web and TV news magazines.In September 2018, we started publishing automatic locations/magnitudes for earthquakes in Italy with magnitude equal to or larger than 3, after a careful analysis of the thresholds and of the best format to use, in order to warrant message understandability and to minimize false or incorrect information. This issue is very critical both to provide the best and fastest information to citizens, and to increase people’s trust in scientific information and institutions. These are often blamed by citizens and by media when contradictory information is offered to the public. We will present an analysis of the first 18 months of this testing phase, which has been widely appreciated by the public.

The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) has a long tradition of sharing scientific data, well before the Open Science paradigm was conceived. In the last thirty years, a great deal of geophysical data generated by research projects and monitoring activities were published on the Internet, though encoded in multiple formats and made accessible using various technologies.To organise such a complex scenario, a working group (PoliDat) for implementing an institutional data policy operated from 2015 to 2018. PoliDat published three documents: in 2016, the data policy principles; in 2017, the rules for scientific publications; in 2018, the rules for scientific data management. These documents are available online in Italian, and English (https://data.ingv.it/docs/).According to a preliminary data survey performed between 2016 and 2017, nearly 300 different types of INGV-owned data were identified. In the survey, the compilers were asked to declare all the available scientific data differentiating by the level of intellectual contribution: level 0 identifies raw data generated by fully automated procedures, level 1 identifies data products generated by semi-automated procedures, level 2 is related to data resulting from scientific investigations, and level 3 is associated to integrated data resulting from complex analysis.A Data Management Office (DMO) was established in November 2018 to put the data policy into practice. DMO first goal was to design and establish a Data Registry aimed to satisfy the extremely differentiated requirements of both internal and external users, either at scientific or managerial levels. The Data Registry is defined as a metadata catalogue, i.e., a container of data descriptions, not the data themselves. In addition, the DMO supports other activities dealing with scientific data, such as checking contracts, providing advice to the legal office in case of litigations, interacting with the INGV Data Transparency Office, and in more general terms, supporting the adoption of the Open Science principles.An extensive set of metadata has been identified to accommodate multiple metadata standards. At first, a preliminary set of metadata describing each dataset is compiled by the authors using a web-based interface, then the metadata are validated by the DMO, and finally, a DataCite DOI is minted for each dataset, if not already present. The Data Registry is publicly accessible via a dedicated web portal (https://data.ingv.it). A pilot phase aimed to test the Data Registry was carried out in 2019 and involved a limited number of contributors. To this aim, a top-priority data subset was identified according to the relevance of the data within the mission of INGV and the completeness of already available information. The Directors of the Departments of Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Environment supervised the selection of the data subset.The pilot phase helped to test and to adjust decisions made and procedures adopted during the planning phase, and allowed us to fine-tune the tools for the data management. During the next year, the Data Registry will enter its production phase and will be open to contributions from all INGV employees.

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).

In recent years, the increasing diffusion of story maps as a new communication and information channel allowed the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia to experience this new technique in the field of seismic risk reduction. Starting from the experiences with the technology of ArcGIS On line for the development of applications on seismicity in Italy, we moved to the realization of some story maps to tell aspects of our territory related to seismic and tsunami risk. In particular, in the context of information campaigns IO NON RISCHIO promoted by the Dipartimento della Protezione Civile, interactive maps have been developed in support of the volunteers involved in information activities in the squares of the campaign. The story maps have been also used as a support for trainings, emergency management, in daily information on earthquakes together with the communication channels that INGV has recently developed for the information platform INGVterremoti (http://ingvterremoti.wordpress.com).

This paper describes the main results of the join activities carried out by the DPC-INGV working group within the 2012-2013 DPC-INGV Seismological Projects. The activities were focused to the preparation of a Spatial Data Infrastructure for the management, visualization and distribution of seismic geographic data in different format associated with metadata. A Seismological Geoportal was developed to: i) facilitate the searching of seismological datasets using metadata and ii) to manage the data visualization in different format, according to the international standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium, exploiting different proprietary and open-source software and applications. The Seismological Geoportal will be a fundamental tool for the DPC-INGV Working Group to distribute output and deliverables of the 2014-2015 Seismological and Volcanological Projects.

In this paper we present the geological effects induced by the 2012 Emilia seismic sequence in the Po Plain. Extensive liquefaction phenomena were observed over an area of ~ 1200 km2 following the 20 May, ML 5.9 and 29 May, ML 5.8 mainshocks; both occurred on about E–W trending, S dipping blind thrust faults. We collected the coseismic geological evidence through field and aerial surveys, reports from local people and Web-based survey. On the basis of their morphologic and structural characteristics, we grouped the 1362 effects surveyed into three main categories: liquefaction (485), fractures with liquefaction (768), and fractures (109). We show that the quite uneven distribution of liquefaction effects, which appear concentrated and aligned, is mostly controlled by the presence of paleo-riverbeds, out-flow channels and fans of the main rivers crossing the area; these terrains are characterised by the pervasive presence of sandy layers in the uppermost 5 m, a local feature that, along with the presence of a high water table, greatly favours liquefaction. We also find that the maximum distance of observed liquefaction from the earthquake epicentre is ~ 30 km, in agreement with the regional empirical relations available for the Italian Peninsula. Finally, we observe that the contour of the liquefaction observations has an elongated shape almost coinciding with the aftershock area, the InSAR deformation area, and the I ≥ 6 EMS area. This observation confirms the control of the earthquake source on the liquefaction distribution, and provides useful hints in the characterisation of the seismogenic source responsible for historical and pre-historical liquefactions.

Most part of the vast scientific literature dealing with channel adjustments focuses on the period between the second half of the twentieth century and nowadays, when most of the adjustments occurred and data availability is generally great. On the contrary, few studies were carried out on older adjustments, notwithstanding their analysis is fundamental to fully understand both more recent evolutionary trends and the role possibly played by human disturbances. The lack of studies on older adjustments is total for rivers located in southern Italy. The present study attempts to partly fill this gap. An analysis of the planform changes experienced by Tammaro R. between 1870 and 1955 was carried out by means of a detailed GIS-aided analysis of historical maps. The results were interpreted in the framework of the pre-existing geomorphological, geographical and socio-economic literature. This latter highlighted that the Tammaro R. basin in the studied period was scarcely inhabited and almost un-anthropized, especially in the first part of the studied period. Between 1870 and 1909, the river underwent a slight and quite inhomogeneous widening and moderate increase in fluvial bars, together with a slight straightening and shortening, but without substantial changes in channel morphology, which was single-thread. Between 1909 and 1955, the river experienced a homogeneous and marked widening, increase in sinuosity and lengthening, together with a strong increase in fluvial bars, and the channel morphology drastically changed from single-thread to transitional. This trend was opposite to that of most rivers in that period, possibly because of the scarce human impact on both the Tammaro R. and its basin.

On May 20, 2012, a Ml 5.9 seismic event hit the Emilia Po Plain, triggering intense earthquake activity along a broad area of the Po Plain across the provinces of Modena, Ferrara, Rovigo and Mantova (Figure 1). Nine days later, on May 29, 2012, a Ml 5.8 event occurred roughly 10 km to the SW of the first main shock. These events caused widespread damage and resulted in 26 victims. The aftershock area extended over more than 50 km and was elongated in the WNW-ESE direction, and it included five major aftershocks with 5.1 ≤Ml ≤5.3, and more than 2000 minor events (Figure 1). In general, the seismic sequence was confined to the upper 10 km of the crust. Minor seismicity with depths ranging from 10 km to 30 km extended towards the southern sector of the epicentral area (ISIDe, http://iside.rm.ingv.it/). […]

The largest dataset ever recorded during a normal fault seismic sequence was acquired during the 2009 seismic emergency triggered by the damaging earthquake in L'Aquila (Italy). This was possible through the coordination of different rapid-response seismic networks in Italy, France and Germany. A seismic network of more than 60 stations recorded up to 70,000 earthquakes. Here, we describe the different open-data archives where it is possible to find this unique set of data for studies related to hazard, seismotectonics and earthquake physics. Moreover, we briefly describe some immediate and direct applications of emergency seismic networks. At the same time, we note the absence of communication platforms between the different European networks. Rapid-response networks need to agree on common strategies for network operations. Hopefully, over the next few years, the European Rapid-Response Seismic Network will became a reality., Annals of Geophysics, 54 (4), ISSN:1593-5213

The geothermal resource exploration generally requires a combined analysis of various geo-information datasets. In this framework the geospatial analysis as the weighted overlay, performed under GIS (Geographic Information Systems) environment, represent a strong tool to solve problems such as the site selection. This technique is applied on not homogeneous input data to perform an integrated analysis and producing favourability maps. This work is based on the development of a new weighted overlay scheme, that combines favourable geological factors, which allow the identification of hydrothermal geothermal resources, and geological hazards (seismicity and volcanism), which can potentially limit the exploitation of a geothermal resource. The technique was tested on Tuscany Region (Italy), where two geothermal fields, Larderello-Travale/Radicondoli and Monte Amiata, are in operation. Results show that the most promising areas mostly coincide with the exploited geothermal fields. Moreover, new areas with a high geothermal favourability are identified. Low-cost and rapid resource evaluation approaches like this could play a key role during the early stages of a geothermal exploration plan. Moreover, this methodology could be extensively used in other geothermal areas not only by the scientific community but also by stakeholders, as first concrete tool to explore a potential resource suitable for exploitation.

Since the beginning of the ongoing Amatrice seismic sequence on August 24, 2016, initiated by a Mw 6.0 normal faulting earthquake, the EMERGEO Working Group (an INGV team devoted to earthquake aftermath geological survey) set off to investigate any coseismic effects on the natural environment. Up to now, we surveyed about 750 km2 and collected more than 3200 geological observations as differently oriented tectonic fractures together with intermediate- to small- sized landslides, that were mapped in the whole area. The most impressive coseismic evidence was found along the known active Mt. Vettore fault system, where surface ruptures with clear vertical/horizontal offset were observed for more than 5 km, while unclear and discontinuous coseismic features were recorded along the Laga Mts. Fault systems.