Search

The coupling of a suite of meteorological limited area models with a wave prediction system based on the nesting of different wave models provides for medium-range sea state forecasts at the Mediterranean, regional and coastal scale. The new system has been operational at ISPRA since September 2012, after the upgrade of both the meteorological BOLAM model and large-scale marine components of the original SIMM forecasting system and the implementation of the new regional and coastal (WAM-SWAN coupling) chain of models. The coastal system is composed of nine regional-scale high-resolution grids, covering all Italian seas and six coastal grids at very high resolution, capable of accounting for the effects of the interaction between the incoming waves and the bathymetry. A preliminary analysis of the performance of the system is discussed here focusing on the ability of the system to simulate the mean features of the wave climate at the regional and sub-regional scale. The results refer to two different verification studies. The first is the comparison of the directional distribution of almost one year of wave forecasts against the known wave climate in northwestern Sardinia and central Adriatic Sea. The second is a sensitivity test on the effect on wave forecasts of the spatial resolution of the wind forcing, being the comparison between wave forecast and buoy data at two locations in the northern Adriatic and Ligurian Sea during several storm episodes in the period autumn 2012–winter 2013.

Precision agriculture (PA) is a farming management concept that aims to provide agronomic, economic, and environmental benefits. One of the fields of research in PA is the delineation of Management Unit Zones (MUZs). MUZs are the sub-division of fields featuring an inter-zonal variation delineated by agronomists for on-field PA operations. To develop MUZs, three factors typically need to be considered: input multi-dimensional data, procedures to process the information, and the optimal number of zones a field should be divided into. PA uses digital technologies to collect and analyze a large amount of data, outline MUZs, monitor crops, and carry out site-specific crop management. Web-based spatial decision support systems (WB-SDSS) can provide users with tools that ease the complex procedures for PA. The objective of this study is twofold: on the one hand, we developed a free and open source (FOSS) WB-SDSS to facilitate the implementation and use of such tools for delineating MUZs and monitoring crops; on the other, a MUZs outline procedure was developed based on Sentinel-2 and Planetscope time series data, and spatio-temporal dynamic clustering model using fuzzy c-means. Our study highlighted that the WB-SDSS might be a helpful solution for harmonizing data collected from different sources, easing the implementation and use of complex geospatial procedures for PA, and delineating MUZs. We tested the system on a particularly representative farm in the Emilia Romagna region (Northern Italy), with 512 hectares of durum wheat crops. Using the WB-SDSS, we quickly delineated homogeneous zones for 27 fields in the study area during the phenological cycle of durum wheat (November 2018-June 2019).

A technique to make computer animations representing the propagation of antiplane shear waves in heterogeneous dissipative media is presented. The aim is to develop a useful tool to better investigate the physics of site effectsin the 2D approximation. We apply this technique to real case studies that were the subject of previous papers. For each case study a movie has been made to illustrate the wavefield time evolution and its interaction with the geological structure. All the movies can be seen and downloaded at the web site http://sigfrido.ingrm.it/movies.html. The paper shows the most representative frames of movies, providing an overview of the role played by the topographic irregularities and the geometry of internal discontinuities in trapping and focusing energy. The details of the dynamics are well visualized through movies. Particular attention is devoted to the representation of simulated ground motion in sediment-filled basins under resonance conditions. Problems related to color scales and frame normalization are analysed and discussed.

In seismically active regions with variable dominant focal mechanisms, there is considerable tsunami inundation height uncertainty. Basic earthquake source parameters such as dip, strike, and rake affect significantly the tsunamigenic potential and the tsunami directivity. Tsunami inundation is also sensitive to other properties such as bottom friction. Despite their importance, sensitivity to these basic parameters is surprisingly sparsely studied in literature. We perform suites of systematic parameter searches to investigate the sensitivity of inundation at the towns of Catania and Siracusa on Sicily to changes both in the earthquake source parameters and the Manning friction. The inundation is modelled using the Tsunami-HySEA shallow water code on a system of nested topo-bathymetric grids with a finest spatial resolution of 10 m. This GPU-based model, with significant HPC resources, allows us to perform large numbers of high-resolution tsunami simulations. We analyze the variability of different hydrodynamic parameters due to large earthquakes with uniform slip at different locations, focal depth, and different source parameters. We consider sources both near the coastline, in which significant near-shore co-seismic deformation occurs, and offshore, where near-shore co-seismic deformation is negligible. For distant offshore earthquake sources, we see systematic and intuitive changes in the inundation with changes in strike, dip, rake, and depth. For near-shore sources, the dependency is far more complicated and co-determined by both the source mechanisms and the coastal morphology. The sensitivity studies provide directions on how to resolve the source discretization to optimize the number of sources in Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Analysis, and they demonstrate a need for a far finer discretization of local sources than for more distant sources. For a small number of earthquake sources, we study systematically the inundation as a function of the Manning coefficient. The sensitivity of the inundation to this parameter varies greatly for different earthquake sources and topo-bathymetry at the coastline of interest. The friction greatly affects the velocities and momentum flux and to a lesser but still significant extent the inundation distance from the coastline. An understanding of all these dependencies is needed to better quantify the hazard when source complexity increases.

The expected global sea level rise by the year 2100 will determine adaptation of the whole coastal system and the land retreat of the shoreline. Future scenarios coupled with the improvement of mining technologies will favour increased exploitation of sand deposits for nourishment, especially for urban beaches and sandy coasts with lowlands behind them. The objective of the work is to provide useful tools to support planning in the management of sand deposits located on the continental shelf of Western Sardinia (western Mediterranean Sea). The work has been realised through the integration of data and information collected during several projects. Available data consist of morpho-bathymetric data (multibeam) associated with morphoacoustic (backscatter) data, collected in the depth range −25 to −700 m. Extensive coverage of high-resolution seismic profiles (Chirp 3.5 kHz) has been acquired along the continental shelf. Also, surface sediment samples (Van Veen grab and box corer) and vibrocorers have been collected. These data allow mapping of the submerged sand deposits with the determination of their thickness and volume and their sedimentological characteristics. Furthermore, it is possible to map the seabed geomorphological features of the continental shelf of Western Sardinia. All the available data (https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.895430) have been integrated and organised in a geodatabase implemented through a GIS and the software suite Geoinformation Enabling ToolkIT StarterKit® (GET-IT), developed by researchers of the Italian National Research Council for RITMARE project. GET-IT facilitates the creation of distributed nodes of an interoperable spatial data infrastructure (SDI) and enables unskilled researchers from various scientific domains to create their own Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard services for distributing geospatial data, observations and metadata of sensors and data sets. Data distribution through standard services follows the guidelines of the European Directive INSPIRE (DIRECTIVE 2007/2/EC); in particular, standard metadata describe each map level, containing identifiers such as data type, origin, property, quality, processing processes to foster data searching and quality assessment.

Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Analysis (PTHA) quantifies the probability of exceeding a specified inundation intensity at a given location within a given time interval. PTHA provides scientific guidance for tsunami risk analysis and risk management, including coastal planning and early warning. Explicit computation of site-specific PTHA, with an adequate discretization of source scenarios combined with high-resolution numerical inundation modelling, has been out of reach with existing models and computing capabilities, with tens to hundreds of thousands of moderately intensive numerical simulations being required for exhaustive uncertainty quantification. In recent years, more efficient GPU-based High-Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, together with efficient GPU-optimized shallow water type models for simulating tsunami inundation, have now made local long-term hazard assessment feasible. A workflow has been developed with three main stages: 1) Site-specific source selection and discretization, 2) Efficient numerical inundation simulation for each scenario using the GPU-based Tsunami-HySEA numerical tsunami propagation and inundation model using a system of nested topo-bathymetric grids, and 3) Hazard aggregation. We apply this site-specific PTHA workflow here to Catania, Sicily, for tsunamigenic earthquake sources in the Mediterranean. We illustrate the workflows of the PTHA as implemented for High-Performance Computing applications, including preliminary simulations carried out on intermediate scale GPU clusters. We show how the local hazard analysis conducted here produces a more fine-grained assessment than is possible with a regional assessment. However, the new local PTHA indicates somewhat lower probabilities of exceedance for higher maximum inundation heights than the available regional PTHA. The local hazard analysis takes into account small-scale tsunami inundation features and non-linearity which the regional-scale assessment does not incorporate. However, the deterministic inundation simulations neglect some uncertainties stemming from the simplified source treatment and tsunami modelling that are embedded in the regional stochastic approach to inundation height estimation. Further research is needed to quantify the uncertainty associated with numerical inundation modelling and to properly propagate it onto the hazard results, to fully exploit the potential of site-specific hazard assessment based on massive simulations.

Recently, practitioners and researchers dealing with rural landscape analysis and characterization are facing the challenge of managing and sharing huge amount of geospatial data and information. Thanks to the internet diffusion and speed, it is easier to share data in the World Wide Web. It is worth highlighting that the data sharing process can improve participatory planning processes. Moreover, is also allows an easy comparison among different landscape areas. Sharing can be done with varying degrees of interoperability and different software tools, proprietary as well as free and open source (FOSS). A widespread way to share geospatial data and metadata is by Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) taking advantages on the use of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. By the way, data sharing through OGC services lack in data harmonization and in semantic enablement, thus making difficult compare, search and analyze data given by different sources. Different data schemas and linguistic barrier hinder the usefulness of data obtained from different sources. To overcome these limitations, in this study we show a novel data workflow implemented for sharing in an interoperable, harmonized and semantically enriched way, multi-temporal land cover (LC) datasets collected in a previous landscape characterization researches.

The sharing of research data allows for information reuse and knowledge advancement but its realization is often a challenge and seldom successful in practice. We propose a workflow for the design of a User Support System (USS) aimed at tutoring research groups in data sharing by considering their social and domain backgrounds. Our engagement approach focuses on multidisciplinary geospatial research, particularly when interoperable data sharing is required. Specifically, we first characterize the research community on the basis of the behavior and competences in data management by its groups and then target the needs of the latter with specific facilities. We address for the first time in literature the issue of modeling research groups as targets of the USS and provide a roadmap to standardize USS activities across different communities. We describe the implementation of the workflow in the context of an Italian research project and we assess the impact of the USS in terms of increase in the number of nodes and resources in the project’s data infrastructure, and of fulfilment of the expectations by the research groups.

The expensive reengineering of the sequential software and the difficult parallel programming are two of the many technical and economic obstacles to the wide use of HPC. We investigate the chance to improve in a rapid way the performance of a numerical serial code for the simulation of the transport of a charged carriers in a Double-Gate MOSFET. We introduce the Drift-Diffusion-Schrödinger-Poisson (DDSP) model and we study a rapid parallelization strategy of the numerical procedure on shared memory architectures.

The NF-κB signalling module controls transcription through a network of protein kinases such as the IKKs, as well as inhibitory proteins (IκBs) and transcription factors including RelA/p65. Phosphorylation of the NF-κB subunits is critical for dictating system dynamics. Using both non-targeted discovery and quantitative selected reaction monitoring-targeted proteomics, we show that the cytokine TNFα induces dynamic multisite phosphorylation of RelA at a number of previously unidentified residues. Putative roles for many of these phosphorylation sites on RelA were predicted by modelling of various crystal structures. Stoichiometry of phosphorylation determination of Ser45 and Ser42 revealed preferential early phosphorylation of Ser45 in response to TNFα. Quantitative analyses subsequently confirmed differential roles for pSer42 and pSer45 in promoter-specific DNA binding and a role for both of these phosphosites in regulating transcription from the IL-6 promoter. These temporal dynamics suggest that RelA-mediated transcription is likely to be controlled by functionally distinct NF-κB proteoforms carrying different combinations of modifications, rather than a simple ‘one modification, one effect’ system.

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake (Mw = 9.1) highlighted previously unobserved features for megathrust events, such as the large slip in a relatively limited area and the shallow rupture propagation. We use a Finite Element Model (FEM), taking into account the 3D geometrical and structural complexities up to the trench zone, and perform a joint inversion of tsunami and geodetic data to retrieve the earthquake slip distribution. We obtain a close spatial correlation between the main deep slip patch and the local seismic velocity anomalies, and large shallow slip extending also to the North coherently with a seismically observed low-frequency radiation. These observations suggest that the friction controlled the rupture, initially confining the deeper rupture and then driving its propagation up to the trench, where it spreads laterally. These findings are relevant to earthquake and tsunami hazard assessment because they may help to detect regions likely prone to rupture along the megathrust, and to constrain the probability of high slip near the trench. Our estimate of ~40 m slip value around the JFAST (Japan Trench Fast Drilling Project) drilling zone contributes to constrain the dynamic shear stress and friction coefficient of the fault obtained by temperature measurements to ~0.68 MPa and ~0.10, respectively.

The calcium antagonists including Diltiazem have been proved to inhibit platelet aggregation caused by ADP. In order to demonstrate the anti-aggregant properties of Diltiazem, a study was conducted on the aggregation curves in blood samples from 20 healthy subjects before and after a week's treatment with 240 mg oral Diltiazem per diem. The experiment confirmed the anti-aggregant properties of Diltiazem which is therefore useful in the treatment of cardiovascular disease given its capacity to dilate the coronary arteries and inhibit platelet aggregation.