ALBERT

Description: One of the primary activities of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology; INGV) is the production of resources concerning educational and outreach projects in geophysics and natural hazard topics. This activity is aimed at transferring, periodically, results at the forefront of ongoing research to the public through an intense and comprehensive plan for scientific dissemination. Over the past 15 years, graphic and visual communication have become essential tools for supporting institutional and research activities. In this paper, we describe successful INGV team experiences resulting from a close relationship and collaborative work between graphic designers and research scientists. The main goal of the projects devoted to the general public, through the creation of a museum exhibition or the production of descriptive brochures, is to support scientists in conveying their message and making concepts fruitful, easier to understand but also fully enjoyable thanks to the emotional involvement that images may generate. Through a careful composition of signs and images, and through the use of different visual tools (colours, form and lettering) on different media (print, video and web), the graphics and editorial products together create a strong INGV-style identity, making it easily recognizable in any educational and outreach project. A full project product package might include a logo or other artwork, organized text and pure design elements such as shapes and colours, which serve the purpose of unifying the whole set. Colour is used not only to help the project logo to stand out from the international overview but, in our case, also to generate a unifying return across all INGV sections. A recent and highly stimulating experience concerned the creation of edu-games, specifically designed for scientific dissemination, through a close collaboration between INGV graphic designers and their reference scientific community. The edu-games were designed as an effective combination of educational content and playful communicative aspects, leading the young players to learn while having fun.

Description: Published

Description: 407–425

Description: 2TM. Divulgazione Scientifica

Description: N/A or not JCR

Description: “10 years with planet Earth” is the title of the calendar created for primary schools, realized in 2016 by the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), the Italian Institute of Geophysical Research. The calendar is the outcome of a project created to support and complement 15 years of dissemination activities with schools. Each year for 10 years, we have printed calendars that represented different subjects related to a world in constant evolution. Each year we have launched a calendar competition among schools, asking children to send in drawings related to the chosen theme. The aim was to stimulate interest in learning about Earth sciences and the dynamics of planet Earth, as well as to raise awareness of water resources availability, the prevention of natural disasters and planet sustainability. We have received about 10 000 drawings from students of more than 400 schools. For each yearly competition, we have chosen the most significant drawings and we have included them in the calendar. The creators of the drawings were awarded by scientists, journalists, artists, science communicators and even by a government minister. In addition to the competition, the drawings reflect impressions and thoughts and illustrate the children's point of view. From the images, one can feel great sensitivity, consideration, responsiveness and respect for the planet as well as positive feelings towards science.

Description: Published

Description: 443–452

Description: 2TM. Divulgazione Scientifica

Description: N/A or not JCR

Description: The StratoClim stratospheric aircraft campaign took place in summer 2017 in Nepal (the 27th of July - 10th of August) and provided a wide dataset of observations of air composition inside the Asian Monsoon Anticyclone. In the framework of this project, with the purpose of modelling the injection of pollutants and natural compounds into the stratosphere, we performed a series of diffusive back-trajectories runs along the flights’ tracks. The availability of in-situ measurements of trace gases has been exploited 5 to evaluate the capability of the trajectory system to reproduce the transport in the Upper Troposphere - Lower Stratosphere (UTLS) region. The diagnostics of the convective sources and mixing in the air parcel samples have been derived by integrating the trajectories output with high-resolution observations of cloud tops from the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG1) and Himawari geostationary satellites. Back-trajectories have been calculated using meteorological fields from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis (ERA-Interim and ERA-5) at 3h and 1h resolution, using both kinematic and diabatic vertical motion. The comparison among the different trajectory runs shows, in general, a higher consistency with observed data, as well as a better agreement between the diabatic and kinematic version, when using ERA-5 based runs with respect to ERA-Interim. Overall, a better capacity in reproducing the pollution features is finally found in the diabatic version of the ERA-5 runs. Adopting this setting for the analysis, a large variety of transport conditions have been individuated during the 8 flights of the campaign. The larger influence by convective injections is found from the continental sources of China and India. Only a small contribution appears to be originated from maritime regions, in particular the South Pacific and the Bay of Bengal that, unexpectedly, was not particularly active during the period of the campaign. Thin filamentary structures of polluted air, characterized by peaks in CO, are observed, mostly associated with young convective air (age less than a few days) and a predominant South-China origin. Observed air from continental India, on the contrary, is often linked to a lower concentration of the trace gas and to air masses that recirculated within the anticyclone for 10 to 20 days. Vertical stratification in the age of air is observed: up to 15 km, the age is less than 3 days and these fresh air masses constitute almost the totality of the air composition. A transition layer is then individuated between 15 km and 17 km, where the convective contribution is still dominant and the ages vary between one and two weeks. Above this level, the mean age of the air sampled by the aircraft is estimated to be 20 days. There, the convective contribution rapidly decreases with height, and finally became negligible around 20 km.

Description: Published

Description: 12193-12210

Description: 2A. Fisica dell'alta atmosfera

Description: JCR Journal

Description: Tectonic styles and distributions of nodal planes are an essential input for probabilistic seismic hazard assessment. As a part of a recent elaboration of a new seismic hazard model for Italy, we adopted a cascade criteria approach to parametrize the tectonic style of expected earthquake ruptures and their uncertainty in an area-based seismicity model. Using available or recomputed seismic moment tensors for relevant seismic events (Mw starting from 4.5), first arrival focal mechanisms for less recent earthquakes, and also geological data on past activated faults, we collected a database for the last ~ 100 yrs gathering a thousand of data all over the Italian peninsula and regions around it. The adopted procedure consists, in each seismic zone, of separating the available seismic moment tensors in the three main tectonic styles, making summation within each group, identifying possible nodal plane(s) taking into account the different percentages of tectonic styles and including, where necessary, total or partial random source contributions. Referring to the used area source model, for several seismic zones we obtained robust results, e.g. along the southern Apennines we expect future earthquakes to be mostly extensional, although in the outer part of the chain strike-slip events are possible. In the Northern part of the Apennines we also expect different tectonic styles for different hypocentral depths. In zones characterized by a low seismic moment release, the possible tectonic style of future earthquakes is less clear and it has been represented using different combination (total or partial) of random sources.

Description: Published

Description: 3577–3592

Description: 6T. Studi di pericolosità sismica e da maremoto

Description: JCR Journal