1. Hosting Institution

INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, Italy

2. Description

2.1. WIS EMSO and INFN Research Facility

The joint WIS EMSO and INFN-LNS facility is based on a marine infrastructure built on an underwater electro-optical cable on the seafloor in front of Catania, that splits into two branches, one designed to host geophysical and oceanographic stations managed by INGV for EMSO-ERIC; the other one directly managed by INFN hosted acoustic stations (Onde till 2006, SMO till 2022). Also, the FOCUS-ERC experiment is connected to the facility fibre network, providing relative strain measurements of optical fibres based on Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometry. The INGV branch is equipped with a smart cable and observatories with seismometers and oceanographic sensors; by September 2024 the INFN branch will be equipped with hydrophones and oceanographic sensors.

2.2. Facility available for Geo-INQUIRE TA

During the project, access to the infrastructure will be provided through connection to max 2 fibres of the 28 km telecommunication cable managed by INFN.

The INFN installation offers technical support for the experimental setup, and the storage of the acquired data (for a maximum of 30 TB and 30 days), including a protected endpoint for data retrieval. 

3. Services offered

The infrastructure offers the following services:

• physical access to the shore laboratory of the Port of Catania;
• GPS (NTP, PPS, 10 MHz clk, PTP)
• Gbps ethernet connection wired and wireless (including Eduroam access);
• OTDR for cable check (no recording)
• users can use proprietary DAS interrogator or request concurrently the DAS interrogator offered by GFZ in the Eastern Sicily Testbed (TA3-83-6)
• access to sound library (SMO, OnDE).

4. Modality of access

Physical and network access is allowed following the INFN LNS regulation

https://www.lns.infn.it/en/user/access-info.html

For networking see

https://www.lns.infn.it/it/download/download-history/category/30-calcolo.html

The unit of the physical access to the services is “1 day”. The duration of the physical access varies from 5 to 15 days per call for a maximum of 3 users per project.

5. Support

Access to fibre optic cables, and the use of DAS interrogators will be supported by the supervision of highly specialized personnel.

The INFN installation also offers technical support for installation of the experimental setup end networking.

6. Additional information

Open access to the data acquired in the TA activities should be provided. Data will be transferred to WP2 according to standardized metadata and formats.

7. Contact person

Giorgio Maria Riccobene riccobenelns.infn.it