DATA INTEGRATION FROM THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY AND CTBTO: THE ITALIAN NDC EXPERIENCE WITH ANTELOPE

The Italian Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) is hosting the Italian National Data Center (INDC) for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban-Treaty Organization (CTBTO). One of the main tasks associated with the planned verification system of CTBTO is the production of a bulletin of global seismic activity. Such a bulletin will facilitate the efforts of state parties to monitor events and identify underground explosions that might be conducted in violation of the Treaty. To accomplish this task, a bulletin must cover the entire globe with a minimum threshold and location accuracy specified by the protocol of the treaty. The preparation of the CTBTO networks--the International Monitoring System (IMS)--and of the related International Data Centre (IDC) is ongoing. An important aspect of this preparation process is the evaluation of the quality of all the IDC products, so as to be able to optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall system. Moreover, the tasks of a typical NDC include a mixture of the following: monitoring of the status of the IMS/IDC, contributing to further refinement of the IDC processing, and evaluating the data provided by the IDC. Therefore a NDC must have the capability to process raw data provided by the IMS, combine IMS data with additional data to achieve higher accuracy, and discriminate the nature of an event. As a contribution to the evaluation task, the technical Working Group B (WGB) of CTBTO has suggested comparison between the bulletins produced by IDC and regional/local networks. The Italian National Data Center has been collecting data since September 2002 from several regional networks in the European-Mediterranean region. The data are collected, processed, stored, and exchanged by the Antelope software package installed on Sun workstations. Previous SRL reports have discussed the use of the Antelope software in comparison with other packages. Following the contributions of Malone (1999) and Hansen (2000), in this report we describe the use of Antelope for the Italian CTBTO NDC in the hopes that our experiences will be useful for other data centers, either dedicated to CTBTO or not.