Irene Molinari

Irene Molinari
Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia | INGV · Sezione di Bologna

PhD

About

64
Publications
19,246
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1,308
Citations
Introduction
Irene Molinari currently works at Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Bologna (Italy) . Previously she worked at the Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zurich. Irene does research in Seismology. Her current main project is 'AlpArray international research initiative -- www.alparray.ethz.ch.'.
Additional affiliations
November 2018 - present
Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia
Position
  • Researcher
September 2016 - present
ETH Zurich
Position
  • Lecturer
Description
  • Seismotectonics, Seismic Tomography, Earthquake source physics
March 2015 - October 2018
ETH Zurich
Position
  • Researcher

Publications

Publications (64)
Article
Full-text available
We present a new crustal model for the European Plate, derived from collection and critical integration of information selected from the literature. The model covers the whole European Plate from North Africa to the North Pole (20N-90N) and from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to the Urals (40W-70E). The chosen parametrization represents the crust in three...
Article
We built a 3D seismic model of the Po Plain and neighboring regions of northern Italy, covering altogether an area about 600 km by 300 km with an approximately 1 km spaced grid. We started by collecting an extensive and diverse set of geological and geophysical data, including seismic reflection and refraction profiles, borehole logs, and available...
Article
We derive the 3-D crustal structure (S wave velocity) underneath Italy and the Alpine region, expanding and exploiting the database of ambient noise Rayleigh-wave phase- and group-velocity of Verbeke et al. (2012). We first complement the database of Verbeke et al. (2012) with a dense set of new ambient-noise-based phase-velocity observations. We n...
Article
Full-text available
We present a database of pre-calculated tsunami waveforms for the entire Mediterranean Sea, obtained by numerical propagation of uniformly spaced Gaussian-shaped elementary sources for the sea level elevation. Based on any initial sea surface displacement, the database allows the fast calculation of full waveforms at coastal sites by linear superpo...
Article
Full-text available
AlpArray is a large collaborative seismological project in Europe that includes more than 50 research institutes and seismological observatories. At the heart of the project is the collection of top-quality seismological data from a dense network of broadband temporary seismic stations, in compliment to the existing permanent networks, that ensures...
Article
Full-text available
We present a new 3D crustal P-wave velocity (VP) model for the greater Alpine region (GAR). We use and merge three different high-quality datasets for local earthquake tomography covering 24 years, starting from January 1st, 1996, up to December 31st, 2019. We processed and repicked the waveforms from the events reported by the European-Mediterrane...
Article
Full-text available
We use seismic ambient noise data from 724 publicly available broadband seismic stations across central Europe to create detailed phase velocity and attenuation maps of Rayleigh waves, focusing on short periods down to 3 s. We interpret these maps in terms of the underlying physical processes relevant to the nature of continental crust. Through a r...
Article
The Pannonian Basin, situated in Central Europe, is surrounded by the Alpine, Carpathian and Dinaric orogens. To understand its tectonic characteristics and evolution, we determine a shear wave velocity model of its crust, mantle lithosphere and asthenosphere consistently by jointly inverting Rayleigh wave phase velocities measured consistently fro...
Article
Precise hypocenter locations are critical for properly interpreting earthquake occurrence processes. However, when the coverage with seismic stations is unfavorable or sparse, locating precisely earthquake hypocenters, in particular their depth, is challenging. Here we apply a newly developed approach, which uses only two land stations, to the rece...
Article
Full-text available
We present the first rupture models of the two mainshocks of the 2012 northern Italy sequence, determined by jointly inverting seismic and geodetic data. We aim at providing new insights into the mainshocks for which contrasting seismotectonic interpretations are proposed in literature. Sources' geometric parameters were constrained by seismic refl...
Article
Different approaches to map seismic rupture in space and time often lead to incoherent results for the same event. Building on earlier work by our team, we “time-reverse” and “back-propagate” seismic surface-wave recordings to study the focusing of the time-reversed field at the seismic source. Currently used source-imaging methods relying on seism...
Article
Full-text available
The Adria microplate has the particular feature to be involved in two subduction systems with slab dipping in opposite directions, one toward west beneath the Apennines and the other to the east beneath the Dinarides. The deep structure of Adria and the shape and characteristics of the slabs have mainly been studied through seismic tomography. Howe...
Article
Full-text available
The mountain chains of the Central Mediterranean (the Apennines, the Alps, the Dinarides, the Albanides, and the Hellenides) are shaped by complex tectonics arising from the motion and collision of several microplates. In recent years, top-quality seismological data from several groundbreaking experiments have yielded new insight into the orogenic...
Article
Full-text available
We take advantage of the new large AlpArray Seismic Network (AASN) as part of the AlpArray research initiative (www.alparray.ethz.ch), to establish a consistent seismicity catalogue for the greater Alpine region (GAR) for the time-period January 1st, 2016–December 31st, 2019. We use data from 1103 stations including the AASN backbone composed of 35...
Article
Full-text available
We present the first three‐dimensional (3D) anisotropic teleseismic P‐wave tomography model of the upper mantle covering the entire Central Mediterranean. Compared to isotropic tomography, it is found that including the magnitude, azimuth, and, importantly, dip of seismic anisotropy in our inversions simplifies isotropic heterogeneity by reducing t...
Article
Full-text available
In this article we describe EPOS Seismology, the Thematic Core Service consortium for the seismology domain within the European Plate Observing System infrastructure. EPOS Seismology was developed alongside the build-up of EPOS during the last decade, in close collaboration between the existing pan-European seismological initiatives ORFEUS (Observa...
Article
Full-text available
In this work, we assess ground shaking in the wider Zagreb area by computing simulated seismograms at regional distances. For the purposes of the simulations, we assemble the 3D velocity and density model and test its performance. We apply this method to the Mw = 5.3 event and four smaller (3.0 < Mw < 5.0) events that occurred in the studied region...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we describe the results of an experimental implementation of the recent guidelines issued by the Italian regulatory body for monitoring hydrocarbon production activities. In particular, we report about the pilot study on seismic, deformation, and pore pressure monitoring of the Mirandola hydrocarbon cultivation facility in Northern It...
Article
Ambient-noise records from the AlpArray network are used to measure Rayleigh wave phase velocities between more than 150,000 station pairs. From these, azimuthally anisotropic phase-velocity maps are obtained by applying the Eikonal tomography method. Several synthetic tests are shown to study the bias in the Ψ2 anisotropy. There are two main group...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The wider area around the city of Zagreb is one of the seismically most active regions in Croatia where many strong events have been reported in the past. Due to the large population and socioeconomic importance of this region, advanced seismic hazard and risk assessment for this area is of high importance. While seismic hazard gives probability th...
Article
Full-text available
This report summarizes the seismicity in Switzerland and surrounding regions in the years 2017 and 2018. In 2017 and 2018, the Swiss Seismological Service detected and located 1227 and 955 earthquakes in the region under consideration, respectively. The strongest event in the analysed period was the ML 4.6 Urnerboden earthquake, which occurred in t...
Article
Full-text available
The tectonic evolution of the European Eastern Alps within the Alpine orogeny is still under debate. Open questions include: the link between surface, crustal and mantle structures; the nature of the Moho gap between the two plates; the relationship between the Alps, the adjacent foreland basin and the Bohemian Massif lithospheric blocks. We collec...
Article
Full-text available
In March/April 2020 the Italian government drastically reduced vehicle traffic and interrupted all non-essential industrial activities over the entire national territory. Italy thus became the first country in the world, with the exception of Hubei, to enact lockdown measures as a consequence of the COVID-19 outbreak and the need to contain it. Ita...
Article
Full-text available
The densely populated Po Plain, a very deep sedimentary basin in northern Italy, is prone to heavy shaking during earthquakes. Seismic hazard assessment must account for local variation in wave amplification. Standard ground motion prediction equations may fail to picture the complexity of strong lateral gradients in seismic response, due to sharp...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding how long-term subduction dynamics relates to the short-term seismicity and crustal tec tonics is a challenging but crucial topic in seismotectonics. We attempt to address this issue by linking long-term geodynamic evolution with short-term seismogenic deformation in the Northern Apennines. This retreating subduction orogen displays te...
Article
Full-text available
Knowledge about the crustal thickness is one of the key elements in the reconstruction of the regional tectonic history. The Dinaric mountain belt is one of the most enigmatic segments of the Alpine‐Mediterranean collision zone, characterized by large variations in crustal thickness and not studied sufficiently. We present a new Moho depth map for...
Article
Full-text available
Starting in 1988, with the installation of the first broadband (BB) instrument in Italy, the Mediterranean Very Broadband Seismographic Network (MedNet) program established a backbone network of BB stations of the highest quality in the Mediterranean Sea countries. The Mediterranean region is characterized by relevant and frequent seismicity relate...
Article
Full-text available
Temperature distribution at depth is of key importance for characterizing the crust, defining its mechanical behavior and deformation. Temperature can be retrieved by heat flow measurements in boreholes that are sparse, shallow, and have limited reliability, especially in active and recently active areas. Laboratory data and thermodynamic modeling...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We present a new crustal thickness map for the wider Dinarides region. The map was constructed from the results of receiver function analyses on more than 90 seismic stations installed in this area, including the newly available AlpArray stations. Moho depth was measured using two methods, simple H − κ stacking and a more complex inversion process...
Article
Full-text available
The AlpArray programme is a multinational, European consortium to advance our understanding of orogenesis and its relationship to mantle dynamics, plate reorganizations, surface processes and seismic hazard in the Alps–Apennines–Carpathians–Dinarides orogenic system. The AlpArray Seismic Network has been deployed with contributions from 36 institut...
Article
Full-text available
The scalar 2-D Helmholtz equation (i.e. ‘membrane waves’) can be used to model surface-wave propagation in a laterally smooth, lossless half-space. Building on this known result, we develop an algorithm to localize earthquake sources based on surface-wave data, via numerical time reversal on a membrane, where monochromatic waves propagate with the...
Poster
Since the end of 2013, the region around the volcanoes Masaya and Momotombo, which includes Nicaraguan capital Managua, has shown unusually high seismic and volcanic activitiy. On April 10, 2013, a M6.3 earthquake occured near Momotombo volcano followed by intense aftershock activitiy and a migration of seismicity towards Managua. In the following...
Article
Full-text available
In the last few decades dense large-scale seismic networks showed their importance in studying the structure of the lithosphere and the upper mantle. The better understanding of the Apennines–Alps–Carpathian–Dinarides system is the main target of the AlpArray European international initiative in which more than 50 institutes are involved. The core...
Article
Full-text available
This report summarizes the seismicity in Switzerland and surrounding regions in the years 2015 and 2016. In 2015, the Swiss Seismological Service detected and located 735 earthquakes in the region under consideration. With a total of 20 earthquakes of magnitude ML ≥ 2.5, the seismic activity of potentially felt events in 2015 was close to the avera...
Article
Full-text available
The tectonics of the Adriatic microplate is not well constrained and remains controversial, especially at its contact with the Dinarides, where it acts as the lower plate. While the northern part of the Adriatic microplate will be accurately imaged within the AlpArray project, its central and southern parts deserve detailed studies to obtain a comp...
Article
Full-text available
We present a database of pre-calculated tsunami waveforms for the entire Mediterranean Sea, obtained by numerical propagation of uniformly spaced Gaussian-shaped elementary sources for the sea level elevation. Based on any initial sea surface displacement, the database allows the fast calculation of full waveforms at the 50 m isobath offshore of co...
Article
Full-text available
The 2011 Tohoku earthquake produced an unexpected large amount of shallow slip greatly contributing to the ensuing tsunami. How frequent are such events? How can they be efficiently modelled for tsunami hazard? Stochastic slip models, which can be computed rapidly, are used to explore the natural slip variability; however, they generally do not dea...
Article
We propose a procedure for uncertainty quantification in Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Analysis (PTHA), with a special emphasis on the uncertainty related to statistical modelling of the earthquake source in Seismic PTHA (SPTHA), and on the separate treatment of subduction and crustal earthquakes (treated as background seismicity). An event tree app...
Article
Full-text available
Non-volcanic continental passive margins have traditionally been considered to be tectonically and magmatically inactive once continental breakup has occurred and seafloor spreading has commenced. We use ambient-noise tomography to constrain Rayleigh-wave phase-velocity maps beneath the eastern Gulf of Aden (eastern Yemen and southern Oman). In the...
Article
Full-text available
On 6 February 2013 an Mw = 8.0 subduction earthquake occurred close to Santa Cruz Islands at the transition between the Solomon and the New Hebrides Trench. The ensuing tsunami caused significant inundation on the closest Nendo Island. The seismic source was studied with teleseismic broadband P-wave inversion optimized with tsunami forward modellin...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Tsunami Service Providers (TSP), providing tsunami warnings in the framework of the systems coordinated by IOC/UNESCO worldwide, and other national tsunami warning centers, are striving to complement, or replace, decision matrices and pre-calculated tsunami scenario databases with FTRT (Faster Than Real Time) tsunami simulations. The aim is to incr...
Article
Full-text available
During the breakup of continents in magmatic settings, the extension of the rift valley is commonly assumed to initially occur by border faulting and progressively migrate in space and time towards the spreading axis. Magmatic processes near the rift flanks are commonly ignored. We present phase-velocity maps of the crust and uppermost mantle of th...
Presentation
Surface-wave dispersion measurements based on seismic background signal (ambient noise) are a very effective means to image S-wave velocity at crustal and lithospheric depths. The goal of our study is to integrate new ambient noise data for central Europe with more traditional models of crustal heterogeneity and discontinuity depths. We find that t...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The current state of the art for the propagation phase in TEWS (Tsunami Early Warning Systems) relies on databases of pre-computed elementary tsunami scenarios and on the linearity of the propagation of tsunami waves in deep waters. The inundation phase sometimes is computed in reduced coastal domains or estimated using empirical formulations, both...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A new Moho depth map for the Antarctic continent has been recently assembled (ANTMoho), merging information retrieved from geophysical and geological studies selected from the literature. A large volume of old and new data have been analyzed: from active seismic prospection,including DSS profiles acquired by Soviet Union field experiments, to recen...
Article
Full-text available
1] We here exploit fundamental mode Rayleigh and Love seismic wave information and the high resolution satellite global gravity model GGM02C to obtain a 1 Â 1 3-D image of: (a) upper-mantle isotropic shear-wave speeds; (b) densities; and (c) density-v S coupling below the European plate (20 N–90 N) (40 W–70 E). The 3-D image of the density-v S coup...
Article
Full-text available
In the last two decades, south-central Europe and the Eastern Alps have been widely explored by many seismic refraction experiments (e.g., CELEBRATION 2000, ALP 2002, SUDETES 2003). Although quite detailed images are available along linear profiles, a comprehensive, three-dimensional crustal model of the region is still missing. This limitation mak...
Article
Realistic simulation of earthquake ground motion requires an accurate Earth model, an efficient tool for seismic wave modeling, and a reliable implementation of the structure in numerical meshes. While knowledge of the crustal structure is generally recognized as a key element in faithful seismic wave propagation simulation, the importance of its a...
Article
Full-text available
The new European Plate crustal model (EPcrust) represents a continental-scale, a priori, compilation of current knowledge on the structure of the upper layers of the earth, designed as a large-scale reference for further seismological studies. Here we review some of the contributions used, and test and compare the model in detail for the Carpathian...
Article
Together with the building and maintenance of observational and data banking infrastructures - i.e. an integrated organization of coordinated sensor networks, in conjunction with connected data banks and efficient data retrieval tools - a strategic vision for bolstering the future development of geophysics in Europe should also address the essentia...
Article
Implementation of crustal structure challenges accuracy and efficiency of practical numerical solutions of the seismic wave equation. Extremely varying thickness of sedimentary layers and depth of Moho discontinuity create the need for finding viable compromises between speed and precision. We present a study of the influence of different numerical...
Article
We present a new comprehensive model of crustal and upper mantle structure of the whole European Plate --- from the North Atlantic ridge to Urals, and from North Africa to the North Pole --- describing seismic speeds (P and S) and density. Our description of crustal structure merges information from previous studies: large-scale compilations, seism...
Article
The representation of crustal structure in 3D numerical models often poses particular problems that are difficult to overcome. Practical implementations of an improved crustal model into efficient tools for seismic wave propagation modeling often fail to honor the strongly varying depth of the Moho discontinuity. The widely used Spectral Element Me...
Article
The strong heterogeneities that characterize the Earth's crust heavily affects the propagation of seismic waves ---such as short-period surface waves--- at regional distance. The knowledge and the representation of crustal structure are crucial points in surface-wave modeling and tomography studies. At continental scale, 2 °Ã- 2 ° global crustal mo...

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