The national alert system for tsunamis generated by earthquakes in the Mediterranean Sea (SiAM), under the coordination of the Civil Protection Department, takes another important step forward.
In fact, since the first days of April 2020, sea level data has been transmitted almost in real time from the tide gauge network stations of the Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) to the Tsunami Alert Center of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (CAT-INGV).
The warning system for tsunamis of seismic origin provides for the sending, within a few minutes of the earthquake, of an alert message from the CAT-INGV to the Civil Protection which immediately disseminates it to the local authorities and to the territorial civil protection system.
Confirmation of a possible tsunami generated by the earthquake can only take place by observing the tidal gauges of the ISPRA network and other networks present in the Mediterranean. The quicker the confirmation, the more effective the risk mitigation measures will be.
Following a period of experimentation that lasted a few years, the transmission technique now activated reduces the transmission time from a few minutes to a few seconds, while ensuring "redundancy" in data transport, thus making the entire tsunami warning system.
The new data transmission system, called FAST, allows the CAT-INGV to have real-time measurements of sea level variations on all national coasts, for immediate verification of possible tsunamis that could hit the Italian coasts and other Mediterranean countries.
This improvement represents a further progress of the alert system, which is in continuous development thanks to the close collaboration between DPC, ISPRA and INGV.
