The INGV seismic monitoring system: activities during the first month of the 2016 Amatrice seismic sequence.

At 01:36:32 UTC on August 24, 2016 an earthquake of ML=6.0 occurred in Central Italy, near Amatrice village; 21 s after the origin time, the first automatic location became available while the first magnitude estimate followed 47s after. The INGV seismologists on duty provided the alert to the Italian Civil Protection Department and thereby triggered the seismic emergency protocol In the hours after the earthquake, hundreds of events were recorded by the Italian Seismic Network of the INGV. SISMIKO, the coordinating body of the emergency seismic network, was activated few minutes after the mainshock. The main goal of this emergency group is to install temporary dense seismic network integrated with the existing permanent networks in the epicentral area to better constrain the aftershock hypocenters. From August the 24th to the 30th, SISMIKO deployed 18 seismic stations, generally six components (equipped with both seismometer and accelerometer), 13 of which were transmitting in real-time to the INGV seismic surveillance room in Rome. All data acquired are available at the European Integrated Data Archive (EIDA). The seismic sequence in the first month generated thousands of earthquakes which were processed and detected by the INGV automated localization system. We analyzed the performance of this system. Hundreds of those events were located by seismologists on shifts, the others were left to be analyzed by the Bollettino Sismico Italiano (BSI). The procedures of the BSI revise and integrate all available data. This allows for a better constrained location and for a more realistic hypocentral depth estimation. The first eight hours of August 24th were the most critical for the INGV surveillance room. Data recorded in these hours were carefully re-analyzed by BSI operators and the number of located events increased from 133 to 408, while the magnitude of completeness dropped significantly from about 3.5 to 2.7.