The interreg IV Italia-Austria SeismoSAT project: Connecting seismic data centers via satellite

Since 2002 OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale) in Udine (Italy), the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG) in Vienna (Austria), and the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje (ARSO) in Ljubljana (Slovenia) are using the Antelope software suite as the main tool for collecting, analyzing, archiving and exchanging seismic data in real time, initially in the framework of the EU Interreg IIIA project "Trans-national seismological networks in the South-Eastern Alps" (Bragato et al., 2004, 2010). The data exchange has proved to be effective and very useful in case of seismic events near the borders between Italy, Austria and Slovenia, where the poor single national seismic networks coverage precluded a correct localization, while the usage of common data from the integrated networks improves considerably the overall reliability of real time seismic monitoring of the area (Fig. 1). At the moment the data exchange between the seismic data centers relies on their internet connections: this however is not an ideal condition for civil protection purposes, since the reliability of standard internet connections is poor. For this reason in 2012 the Protezione Civile della Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano in Bolzano (PCBZ, Italy), OGS, ZAMG subsidiary in Tirol (ZAMG Tirol) and ARSO joined in the Interreg IV Italia-Austria Project "SeismoSAT" (Progetto SeismoSAT, 2012) aimed in connecting the seismic data centers in real time via satellite. ARSO does not belong to the Interreg Italia-Austria region: for this reason ARSO joined the SeismoSAT project as an "associated partner", which, according to Interreg rules can not be funded. ARSO participation in the project is therefore at the beginning limited in benefiting only indirectly from improvement in the robustness of the data exchange between the other data centers, while eventually fully taking part in the project if other sources of funding will be available. The project is in a preliminary phase: the general schema of the project, including first data bandwidth estimates and a possible architecture are here illustrated.