PROJECT

The border region of Slovenia, Austria and NE Italy has experienced several destructive earthquakes in the past. Different seismic networks are operating in the area supporting monitoring, alerting and research. The example of recent strong earthquakes demonstrated that the integration of services provided by the neighbouring networks is essential for a rapid and efficient intervention. 

 

Seismicity map of the border region between NE-Italy (Friuli Venezia Giulia), Austria and Slovenia. In the map the events with magnitude > 3 are shown. In the rectangle the date and magnitude of the major historical events are reported.  

The real or near real-time data exchange is an ongoing effort of our agencies for both civil defence and scientific purposes. In the 2002 the Interreg IIIa Italia/Austria, presented by the Civil Defence of the Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) region and ZAMG, and realized by Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik, Hauptabteilung Geophysik, Wien, Österreich (ZAMG), Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Universita’ di Trieste, Italia (DST), Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale - OGS, Italia (OGS) and Agencija Republike Slovenije za okolje, urad za seizmologijo, Ljubljana, Slovenija (ARSO)  has been started. The goal is the trans-national integration of the existing seismic networks for civil defence purposes. Several data connection systems are tested for reliability. A new data center has been realized in the emergency building of the Civil Defence of the FVG region. The existing data centers will be adapted for the redundancy in data exchange. Network geometries will be optimized to improve detection. The joint intervention efforts in case of destructive earthquakes will be planned. The exchange of meta-data on the configuration of the sensors and their status will be implemented. The softwares used to realize the project are the using Antelope package, produced by BRTT, and the SeisComP package developed by the Geofon and MEREDIAN projects.

 

PROJECT GOALS

  • Establish/upgrade different data centers located at the institutions running the networks in the different countries;

  • Selection and implementation of multiple/redundant data connection systems between the remote stations and the data centers (e.g., satellite, radio telemetry, GPRS, GSM, phone line, etc.); 

  • Improving network geometry for lowering earthquake detection threshold near the border(s); 

  • Mobile network scheduling and operation in case of large earthquakes (e.g., identification of potential station sites, planing and organization of temporary data gathering centers); 

  • Sensor calibration for accurate and consistent determination of magnitude and source parameters;

  • Network state of health and configuration exchange scheme implementation.
 

BOVEC July 12, 2004 event

The July 12, 2004 an earthquake Ml=5.1 struck in Bovec (Slovenia) few kilometers away from the Austrian and Italian border, in the same area where a destructive earthquakes occured in the 1998. The 1998 event has been recorded and located as an event out of network by the different existing seismological networks operating in the 3 countries. Only later the data have been compared and merged. 
In 2004 the advanced realization of this Interreg project allowed to have an automatic location of the event within a minute after the origin time in the datacenters existing in the 3 countries by about 10 stations around the epicenter and by more than 20 stations within 20 minutes from origin time. The database containing the broadband, strong motion and short period waveforms was immediately available for civile defense and scientific purpouses. Several aftershocks has been located as well. 

Waveforms received in real-time or quasi real-time by the datacenters and the automatic location relative to the  Bovec (Slovenia) earthquake (July 12, 2004). 

 

The real-time datacenter at DST.

DST DST - SEISMOLOGY . raf@dst.units.it