The availability of space-borne high resolution full-motion video such as Urthcast or Google’s Terra Bella offer new data sources for imagery analysts. These sensors capture up to 90 seconds of video over an area of interest in high resolution video. The videos are analyzed in industry-standard imagery exploitation software using specialized tools specifically developed for video analysis....
Signatures that are anticipated to be observed of a nuclear explosion is adequately known to the scientific community via accumulated knowledge of previous events. On-Site Inspectors are fully equipped to pick site-specific observables through their thorough training. However, it would be rather peculiar to anticipate conventional observables in a clandestine nuclear explosion, as signatures...
Numerical modelling of seismic wave propagation and seismic motion in realistic models of local small-scale near-surface structures requires realistic physical models and sufficiently accurate numerical-modelling method. Realistic models may include non-planar material interfaces, smooth heterogeneities inside layers/blocks and frequency-dependent attenuation. We present an optimized FD scheme...
A demonstration experiment was recently conducted in the state of Oklahoma in the USA to evaluate strategies for observing the full seismic wavefield, for events at local to teleseismic distances and across a wide range of frequencies. The experiment tested new instrumentation and deployment strategies, producing an open-use dataset for evaluating a range of array processing techniques. The...
The ASHE Asia project is an international collaboration between National Data Centers, operational agencies, and research organizations to improve early notification of potentially hazardous eruptions in Asia and the Western Pacific. The increased availability of open seismo-acoustic data in the ASEAN region and recent advances in mobile distributed sensors networks can reduce notification...
Seismic threat and related earthquake engineering dedications usually require evaluation of return periods or probabilities of exceedance of specific levels of design load criteria or extremal safety conditions. For the purpose, a comprehensive treatment of earthquake hazard estimation, Gumbel’s type-I extremes event probability distribution have been used to estimate designed earthquake...
The nuclear tests by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) have generated both seismic and infrasonic signals. This presentation will address seismo-acoustic analyses of these tests. Special focus will be given to the 2013 and January 2016 tests, that were estimated to have a similar yield. Clear detections were made in the Russian Federation (I45RU) and Japan (I30JP) in 2013 at...
Anthropogenic events of interest to the nuclear treaty monitoring community are typically observed seismically and in some instances acoustically. The number of these events seem to be ever increasing as additional sensors continue to be installed and existing stations are tuned to improve detection capability. The use of non-traditional data sources, such as social media, can corroborate...
Amplitude ratios between the first 2016 and 2013 North Korean nuclear tests for different kinds of seismic waves are compared. The observations show the first 2016 test had generated stronger Rayleigh waves with weaker short period P and Love waves in comparison with the 2013 test. Based on the observations, secondary seismic sources including the DC components caused by tectonic releases and...
We analyze seismic and infrasound signals generated by five underground nuclear tests in North Korea in 2006, 2009, 2013, and 2016 (January and September). Regional data from six seismo-acoustic arrays, cooperatively operated by Southern Methodist University (SMU) and Korea Institute of Geosciences and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) in the Korean peninsula, were used with two additional infrasound...
The CTBT and the Ban Treaty Edward Ifft The UNGA recently voted to authorize negotiation of a treaty banning nuclear weapons. This negotiation will end July 7, shortly after the conclusion of SnT 2017. It may appear that there would be little relationship between such a treaty and the CTBT, but there may be important technical, legal and political issues between the two. The Ban Treaty (BT)...
"Nuclear Testing and Use"
"The CTBT as a Confidence Building Measure"
"Advocacy and Outreach"
NDC Preparedness Exercise 2017 NPE2017
Lead by NDC Germany
Discussion and Arrangements
Globalized Data Dissemination in near real time is a challenge. Data replication as an alternative is cost intensive and delayed. Therefore, one of the possible solutions is to develop a protocol that classifies data at source. This sorting of data is based on spatial, temporal and spectral significances defined at the source. Parametric thresholds, i.e. boundary conditions for classification,...
From definitions of weapons, to articles governing verification of compliance, inspection, and assistance, science and technology underpin international disarmament treaties. Both treaty negotiation and implementation require sound technical advice to inform policy; requiring scientific advisers. Despite this need for science in disarmament, the two worlds are often at odds. The Chemical and...
Global Verification extends far beyond the standard tools of International Monitoring System (IMS), and act as the common platform for public interaction; a platform to share knowledge. The tools of Global Verification regime would be a library of knowledge varying from physical earth characters to possible physiological behaviour of a would-be Inspected State Party. Whereas, On-Site...
Gamma ray spectroscopy is an important tool in ensuring treaty verification and compliance. In employing this tool, it has proven useful to completely characterize the detector efficiency that is yielded via deterministic adjoint radiation transport analysis of typically fielded germanium gamma detectors. The adjoint transport methodology can be readily utilized to produce a high fidelity...
Cyclicity in seismic activity is important for earthquake hazard studies, because these patterns may lead to the prediction of large earthquakes. The observations of temporal variation of seismic activity in Northeast India as well as Gujarat and adjoining region indicate that a periodic seismicity probably exists. In the present study, data from 1819 to 2006 of shallow earthquakes distributed...
After successfully performing an ATM challenge in 2015 the idea of having another and more complex one emerged. The new challenge met with big response from the respective community. 17 organizations from 10 different countries took part. One purpose of the 2nd ATM Challenge 2016 was once again to ascertain the level of agreement one can achieve between real IMS measurements and those...
In this study, we show results from ambient noise correlations. We used two year of continuous data recorded at 59 permanent stations and 19 stations of the AlpArray-EASI profile during 2014 and 2015. Cross correlations of ambient noise are computed in order to estimate the Green's functions of surface waves propagating between the station pairs. Dispersion curves of Rayleigh and Love waves...
Simulations are recognized as a valued instrument in teaching practices, both in natural sciences and in social sciences, thanks to developing a large number of skills. In international studies, simulation events of different scale, e. g. Model United Nations (MUN). However, a common feature, characterizing the majority of teaching and training simulations, is the time limit. Ural Federal...
AFTAC has demonstrated a new approach to analyzing data gaps that identifies and helps to understand drivers of our network performance. Every data gap is now assigned unique identifier, characterized and then cataloged for analysis. Previously, we have struggled to link non-associated data gaps with specific system components or maintenance actions. This new methodology shows how data gaps...
Uncertainties in standardized earthquake locations, which run into tens-of kilometers in many regions of the world, are a serious limitation to seismotectonic studies. We have developed a new two-tiered multiple-event relocation approach that seeks to improve upon these catalog locations, and have applied it to Iran, a country with abundant seismicity (> 40,000 ISC Bulletin events since 1960),...
Abstract As photons enter a mineral, some are reflected from grain surfaces, some pass through the grain, and some are absorbed. Those photons that are reflected from grain surfaces or refracted through a particle are called scattered. Scattered photons may encounter another grain or be scattered away from the surface so they may be detected and measured (a major part of the CTBTO activity)....
The purpose of high-resolution gamma-ray spectrometry during an on-site inspection (OSI) is to determine the presence or absence of radionuclides which indicate the occurrence of a nuclear explosion. High resolution gamma-ray measurements are usually performed using a high-purity germanium detector in the field (in-situ) or in the laboratory to samples taken in the inspected area. The...
Current earthquake-location capabilities provide no better than 25-km precision in remote areas, which is insufficient for many investigations. Surface waves, with their slow horizontal propagation speeds and high signal strength even at teleseismic distances, contain information on earthquake location that can improve epicenter determinations. Earlier work by other authors has demonstrated...
Understanding explosion source processes is of great importance for seismic event characterization and explosive yield estimate. Weston Geophysical conducted a series of chemical explosions using various explosives with different properties in order to investigate their effect on seismic signatures. Previous experimental data (NEDE, e.g. Martin et al, 2012) suggest that low-frequency P-wave...
The objective of establishing National Data Centres (NDCs) is to receive, process and analyse International Monitoring System data to afford each member state independent verfication on treaty compliance. NDCs vary in resources, capacity and competency dictated by the need of each member state. Capacity building undertaken by the Provisional Technical Secretariat (PTS) is constrained by...
We have built a new three components optical seismometer. The oscillation systems consist of a spring-suspended mass which its position is monitored by moiré technique. We use a pair of similar gratings that one of them is fixed to the suspended mass and another is fixed to the seismometer frame. The gratings are installed close to each other with no physical contact, which the planes of the...
This experimental study demonstrates the performance of a three-component optical seismometer. The seismometer components consist of a novel spring-suspended mass whose position is monitored by moiré technique. In this seismometer, two gratings are used, one attached to the suspended mass, and the other one fixed to the frame of the seismometer. Also, a laser diode, a light detector and a...
Seismic phase arrival picking has been firstly carried out manually by qualified analysts. However, the introduction of digital seismic monitoring systems and the increasing volume of data collected by large seismic networks, as well as the need for providing fast earthquake location led to the necessity of developing automatic-picking schemes. A reliable automatic picking task considerably...
Kazakhstan is strongly committed to and ideally suited geographically for monitoring of nuclear explosions. Kazakhstan contributes key seismic stations and arrays to global and other cooperative efforts, though most monitoring activities are concentrated at sites in Central and Eastern Kazakhstan. Western Kazakhstan contains very few seismic stations and had not been adequately surveyed to...
On-site inspections are an integral part of the characterisation and verification of potential nuclear testing events; these involve environmental sampling for off-site analytical determination which may provide evidences of atypical presence and/or amount of radionuclides. As fresh radioactive fallouts are concentrated in the first millimetres of the soil, any anomaly of the topsoil depth...
Underground nuclear explosions can have detectable impacts on surface conditions. The nature of the impact can vary based on several factors including geology. Continuous or fragmented vegetation cover as well as exposed soil may reveal detectable changes related to this impact in the optical and thermal infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. With an appropriate sensor assembly,...
Following underground nuclear explosions, migration of radioactive gases to the atmosphere takes many forms depending on the pressure and temperature evolution in the cavity and the properties of the geological media. This results in a diversity of gas fluxes at the geosphere-atmosphere interface that must be understood for proper detection of nuclear events both through the IMS and from OSI....
The International Data Centre (IDC) determines various types of seismic magnitudes. Estimation of body wave magnitude mb is based on P-waves measured at stations of the International Monitoring System (IMS). Because of the CTBT-related monitoring requirements signal amplitude and corresponding period are measured within a 6 s window, including 5.5 s after arrival time. This is approximately...
The International Data Centre (IDC) estimates absolute location of seismic events in routine processing. The final solution is obtained in interactive analysis and includes geographical coordinates of the epicenter and depth estimate. All estimated values are characterized by uncertainties, which correspond to measurement and modelling errors of arrival times at associated seismic stations of...
North Korea conducted underground nuclear explosions on October 9, 2006 (M 4.3), May 25, 2009 (M 4.7), February 12, 2013 (M 5.1), January 6, 2016 (M 5.1) and September 9, 2016 (M5.3). We used spectral nulls of body waves and Rayleigh waves from regional and teleseismic arrays. We minimized noise signals and nonlinear tectonic effects using well-azimuthal coverage arrays and common depth point...
The Fram Strait is of great importance in ocean climate monitoring, as it is the only deep-water connection between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. An extensive array of oceanographic moorings has been operated in Fram Strait since 1996 to monitor the transports through the Strait. The small spatial scales of the flow are poorly resolved, and lead to large uncertainties. In the 2005–2010...
The blue whale remains endangered, the species has not recovered post whaling. A difficultly has been that this species is extremely hard to survey in the Southern Hemisphere. There are different blue whale subspecies, but although the subspecies look identical they are easily distinguishable by their distinctly different acoustic signals. We have been using the differences in acoustic signals...
The Karonga area is located at the top most part of Northern Malawi and Southern part of Tanzania of Rungwe volcanic region within the EARS. Structurally, the area is defined by almost N-S and NW-SE trending faults .Topographically, the area is mostly hilly and highly faulted as evident from hill shaded SRTM DEM. These faults form part of the extracted lineaments. Automatic extraction of...
A Portable IMS Infrasound Array was installed in Romania, in late September 2016, in a remote mountain area. The array is composed of four elements arranged in a stellar shape. Each element includes: equipment box with digitizer and microbarometer and power supply (charge controller and batteries); wind noise reducing system, connected to the microbarometer in the equipment box; temperature...
During the course of an On Site Inspection (OSI), many different types of data and data products are generated, including cartographic, logistical and technical data. Representing them so the information they contain is easily understood by the Inspection Team is important but extremely challenging whether they are displayed in 2D or 3D additionally, any one result can be displayed in several...
About four years on, introduction of the CTBT Academic curricula in University of Benin, located in South-South Nigeria stimulated its fast spread to other parts of the region; despite the initial hitches. The successes recorded especially in South-South states of Rivers, Bayelsa, Cross Rivers and Delta states, bordering the Atlantic Ocean has been on steady rise. The geometric progression is...
International monitoring system (IMS) stations report state of health (SOH) data at regular intervals. Analysis of this data can provide valuable information about the current performance of the stations as well as help operators diagnose problems. Additionally, the data can provide information about component degradations that could eventually lead to system failure resulting in down-time or...
Powerful volcanic eruptions, such as those of Calbuco in 2015, or Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, may cause disturbances in the different atmospheric layers. These eruptions are measured by infrasound stations and analyzed in order to extract parametric data best characterize the volcanic source. The remote monitoring of volcanic activity with infrasound is of interest to Volcanic Ash Advisory...
Iraq is located at the leading northeastern edge of the Arabian plate. Its seismotectonic framework is a product of the NE motion of the plate and the continental collision along the Bitlis and Zagros orogenic zones. In late 1970s, the country embarked on the establishment of Iraq Seismographic network (ISN) consisting of 5 autonomous observatories equipped with a mix of seismic sensors. In...
The On Site Inspection (OSI) Action Plan (AP) for 2016-19 identifies improvements in aerial operations, particularly in different environmental settings, as two of its goals (A.P. 1.5: Operationalization of OSI's in Different Environments, and AP 1.10: Application of OSI Techniques). In February 2017 a study and field exercise of aerial gamma spectroscopy techniques was performed at a test...
The IMS noble gas station requires to purify and to concentrate Xe by using compact and cost-effective process. CEA has worked for few years on the development of a new adsorbent material to purify and concentrate Xe: silver exchanged zeolite (MFI), Ag@ZSM5. This adsorbent exhibits about two order higher retention capacities than the classical active carbons. In addition, more recent...
If you want to perform a quick macroscopic gamma-survey, one of the best ways is to perform an airborne gamma-spectrometry survey. It allows you to investigate a large area in a short time and at a reasonable cost. The airborne gamma mapping has some limitations caused by the atmosphere shielding for the gamma ray. In this manner and to balance between efficiency and precision we have to use...
In our study, we analyzed the identification ability of first motion amplitude Pi、P maximum amplitude Pm to S maximum amplitude Sm ratios based on the small magnitude earthquakes and explosions occurred in Huailai, Beijing. Considering the variations of amplitude attenuation influenced by propagation paths, we selected reasonable formula to study attenuation characteristics of P, S amplitudes...
Magnitude, a concept first presented by Gutenberg and Richter, is the standard measure for the strength of an earthquake. The IDC defines the body wave magnitude for event i at station j as m(sta) =log (A⁄T)+VC(∆,h), where A is the maximum amplitude, T is the corresponding time period, VC is the Veith-Clawson (VC) correction compensating for the epicentral distance of the station (∆), and the...
Fragmented time series are not unusual in the radionuclide results reported by the International Data Center (IDC), especially those measured with Xe monitors. When the number of valid data (understood as over the decision limit) is high, simple interpolation methods are good enough in most cases. When the number of valid data is low, time series reconstruction offers preliminary results that...
Assessment of Infrasound technology event contribution towards the REB production for the year 2016 at the IDC is performed. During that year 37,090 REB events were produced using the three technologies (Infrasound, Seismic, and Hydroacoustic). To accomplish the assessment task geographical, seasonal and daily occurrence distributions are considered. Seismic only events contribution to the...
A hybrid method, with the combination of analytical Modal Summation (MS), numerical Finite Difference (FD) and Green Function (GF) to generate synthetic signals is developed. In this procedure we try to synthetically generate a small magnitude event using the pre-known hybrid technique of MS and FD as green function to simulate and scale target event through GF method. This modeling procedure...
A prototype of the SAUNA III system has been running in parallel with the SEX63 SAUNA II IMS station in Stockholm since December 2016. The SAUNA II system at SEX63 measures samples with 12 hour time resolution, while the SAUNA III system measures 6-hour air samples, each containing at least twice the amount of stable xenon compared to the SAUNA II. This results in a considerable improvement in...
In this work, we presented a numerical study of the phenomenon of heat transfer through the laminar, incompressible and steady mixed convection in a closed square cavity with the left vertical wall of the cavity is subjected to a warm temperature, while the right wall is considered to be cold. The horizontal are assumed adiabatic. . The numerical simulations were performed for a wide range of...
Indonesia is known as a region that has a unique structure and complex geology. This because Indonesia is a located at triple junction plate convergence: Indo-Australian plate relative moves to north, Euarasian Plate to south and Pasific plate to west. As a result of these condition, in this junction between plate and the area of the active faults frequently earthquakes. In this study, the...
Iterative Joint Inversion is one of the methods which used to determine stress orientation based on earthquake focal mechanism data. Stress orientation determination of the earthquake events is very useful for disaster mitigation field. This research used Iterative Joint Inversion method to determine stress orientation in double subduction zone of Maluku Sea region. The earthquake focal...
Caucasus is prone to stress-related geohazards because of its tectonic setting and the high overpressures. Here we analyze and model the effect of local topography anomaly on the stress-strain formation of the Caucasus lithosphere (Azerbaijan). Technique is based on numerical analysis with finite element modeling. The model results show that the stress orientations are influenced by the...
The report shows the investigation results of the wave pattern of underground and air nuclear explosions conducted at Lop Nor Test Site (China), and tectonic earthquakes with epicenters close to the Test Site region. For the analysis, the digitized analogue and digital seismograms from Central Asia seismic stations at distances of ~700–2000 km for the period of 1965-2016 were used. For seismic...
Information magnitude of the earthquake effect on the affected area is a very important thing for the rescue. Besides magnitude earthquake parameters, geological information and the rock density determine the earthquake effects. The smaller density of the area, the effects of the earthquake were felt also getting bigger. The simple information on the structural conditions of a region can be...
In order to obtain earthquake locations of high fidelity it is important to perform hypocenter relocation accurately with an appropriate methodology. This is because errors due to the velocity structure model cannot be minimized when determining the hypocenter. In this study, the Kebumen earthquake of January 25, 2014 and its aftershocks were relocated using both MJHD and Double Difference...
Characters from the initial impulse wave signals coming from the explosion is compression or trending upward in the early phase of the earthquake is recorded while the earthquake wave signal has an initial impulse can vary the compression or dilation (trending down) depending position relative to the source of the earthquake station. In the case of North Korea's nuclear test in 2016. When...
The IAEA’s network of Analytical Laboratories for the Measurement of Environmental Radioactivity (ALMERA), consisting early 2017 of 160 laboratories in 87 countries, has for aim to provide timely and reliable measurement results of environmental radioactivity in routine monitoring and emergency situations. The IAEA supports the ALMERA laboratories in their environmental monitoring activities...
A research has been done to compare frequency response, its dominant frequency and its correlation between North Korea's Nuclear Test Explosions. We used recent North Korea's Nuclear Test Explosions that recorded in the CTBTO's Seismic Stations nearby Korean Peninsula. We used seismic recording data in MiniSEED dataset format of the events from each station and its dataless SEED format....
Superconducting Gravimeter are the most sensitive instrument to measure gravity change’s continuously in low frequencies. In Indonesia, there is one Superconducting Gravimeter that installed in Cibinong. Using this SG, we studied gravity changes during Indonesia’s large earthquakes event. Global CMT recorded 17 earthquakes in Indonesia that had magnitude moment (Mw) > 6 since January until...
Remote optical imagery, including panchromatic, multispectral, and infrared, can be acquired during on-site inspection (OSI) to search for anomalies and artifacts. Imagery acquired during an OSI can provide unique information that may increase an inspection team’s efficiency and effectiveness at prioritizing regions of interest within an inspection area. For example, optical imagery can reveal...
In this work, we apply an advanced machine learning technique named diffusion maps for automatic earthquake-explosion discrimination and for explosion classification in Israel. The proposed methods construct a low-dimensional model of the original data. In this new low-dimensional space discrimination and classification analysis is carried out. In addition, the new construction allows...
A significant portion of CTBT permitted techniques for use during an on-site inspection are the geophysical techniques. While passive seismological monitoring for aftershocks can be utilized during all periods of an on-site inspection, other techniques like resonance seismometry, active seismic surveys, magnetic and gravitational field mapping, ground penetrating radar and electrical...
A number of sources on the earth and in atmosphere can produce the low frequency infrasound atmospheric waves. Infrasound waves are generated by the regular air traffic subsonic signals. On quiet nights when the measurement conditions are ideal, near infrasound arrays airplanes can be detected at high altitudes. Infrasound signals from aircrafts are characterized by rapid variation in azimuth...
Natural Ar-37 in the atmosphere is produced by spallation of argon through 40Ar(n,4n)37Ar and by neutron capture, 36Ar(n,γ) 37Ar. The resulting equilibrium concentrations of Ar-37 in the stratosphere and troposphere are about 10 mBq/m3air and 0.5-1 mBq/m3air, respectively as deduced from direct measurements and theoretical calculations. Activity concentrations in atmospheric air measured in...
Robust infrasound signal detection and association remains a challenge. False automatically generated infrasound bulletin events impact upon analyst workload at the International Data Centre, and therefore there is interest in improving association algorithms. One signal characteristic that is currently not utilized in the association process is signal duration. Results from a suite of over 40...
After adoption of the CTBT, experts from all over the world faced the challenge of having to install a large number of stations in a wide range of places. ARN was designated in 1999 by the MFA as PoC between Argentina and the PREPCOM, being responsible for the RN and IS technology. In this sense, ARN started working towards the installation of the stations under its responsibility, being able...
The Reviewed Event Bulletin (REB) of the IDC includes more than 500,000 events with associated seismic phases. The quality of these events and its completeness depends on multistage automatic processing followed by interactive analysis. The IDC raw data archive allows to apply the method of waveform cross correlation (WCC) for assessment of the similarity between seismic signals associated...
In order to assess the dispersal of radionuclides, e.g., Cs-137 and Cs-134, from the Fukushima disaster towards the coastline of Vietnam, the task of monitoring the radionuclides in the seawater has been conducted in the Institute for Nuclear Science and Technology, VINATOM, Vietnam since 2013. Seawater samples of 200 liters have been collected repeatedly every three months in the Gulf of...
A probabilistic seismic hazard assessment for Zimbabwe is analysed according to the data and statistics of the seismicity of Zimbabwe and sources of earthquakes around the country. Data from different sources were merged and duplicate earthquakes were removed. Data from IMS stations in Southern Africa ,Zimbabwe included contributed to the catalogue from 2003.The catalogue was unified with all...
In this work we assess the quality of the regular REB by comparing it with a baseline bulletin REB produced during the 2016 experiment by an independent team of waveform analysts for three reference days. The assessment is done using an external software package based on generic comparison of focal parameters and a set of IDC built-in scripts designed for internal comparison of PTS bulletins....
Although nuclear power is considered to be economically beneficial, it has serious risks for environmental and human health. Turkey plans to build two nuclear power plants in Mediterranean and Black Sea coastlines: Akkuyu and Sinop NPPs. The atmospheric dispersion of Cs-137 to be released from potential accidents in these plants were modeled and total ground deposition of Cs-137 were estimated...
In this work, Atmospheric Transport Models (ATM) are presented as a strategic design tool for the mitigation of radioxenon release to the atmosphere and to evaluate the impact of others radionuclide emissions, like: I-131, I-133, Kr-85, Kr-85M, Kr-87 and Kr-88, among others nuclides. The design of Medical Isotope Production Facilities (MIPF), includes safety and security protection...
For practicing verification procedures and interplay between the International Data Centre (IDC) and National Data Centres, NDC prepardness exercises (NPE) are regularly performed with selected events of fictitious CTBT-violation suspicion. The German NDC's expertise for radionuclide analyses and operation of station RN33 is provided by the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) while...
Forward simulations of the atmospheric dispersion from sites of particular interest are regularly performed at BGR, the German NDC. Since 2012 four forecasts per day are performed with the Lagrangian Particle Dispersion Model HYSPLIT (NOAA) and GFS (NCEP) meteorological data for potential releases from the known DPRK test site. The forecasts are used to assess the plume propagation patterns...
The International Monitoring System (IMS) developed by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) is a global system of monitoring stations, using four complementary technologies: seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide. The radionuclide network comprises 80 stations, of which more than 60 are certified. The aim of radionuclide stations is a global monitoring of...
In May 2010, xenon and its daughter radionuclides were detected at four radionuclide stations in South Korea, Japan, and the Russian Federation. Some scientists estimated that the detected radionuclides had been originated from mountain Mantop where some underground nuclear tests were performed, or Yongbyon site where a small nuclear reactor operated in North Korea. In this study, source...
An important parameter which directly affects the propagation of seismic waves either in earthquakes or explosions is attenuation coefficient, quality factor of an area. Quality factor of seismic waves, Q, in the lithosphere at high frequencies (1 to 20 Hz) is one of the most useful parameters to explain attenuation of seismic waves as an important property for the study of earth structure...
Explosive volcanic eruptions are among the most powerful sources of infrasound observed on Earth, with recordings routinely made at ranges of hundreds to thousands of kilometers. These eruptions can also inject large volumes of ash into heavily travelled aviation routes, thus posing a significant societal and economic hazard. Detecting and counting the global occurrence of explosive volcanism...
Waveform correlation techniques have proven effective detecting repeated events from large aftershock sequences; however, application for monitoring a large region over a long time period has yet to be adequately explored. We applied waveform correlation to continuous waveform data for the year 2012 at twelve stations spread through Eastern Asia, using automatically generated templates from...
The GDMS Nuclear Monitoring program requires software and hardware testing to support operations, maintenance, upgrades and sustainment of the RASA particulate radionuclide monitoring system. The software is under active development to repair bugs, add enhancements, and support obsolescence of individual hardware components. Prior to this automation effort, GDMS engineers manually tested the...
Automatic classification of seismic P and S wave signals is essential in automatic seismic event detection and location systems. The problem is tackled by utilizing multiple signals of different types each in several frequency bands. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are a robust and efficient tool in classification using large amount of input parameters. P and S wave signals have fundamentally...
The Reviewed Event Bulletin (REB) produced by the IDC (International Data Center) of the CTBTO includes thousands of industrial explosions detected by the primary seismic network of the International monitoring system every year. According to the CTBTO’s monitoring mandate, these events represent background noise, which demands human and computer resources for interactive and automatic...
Power optimizations beside power sourcing innovations and global coverage by satellite networks supports designing autonomous – intelligent sensor systems. These systems can be deployed in hitherto unreachable geographic locations and can operate without much needed human interface. Such proposed systems have many other related advantages. The architecture of such systems, in brief, may...
The Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, where this author works, aims to bring clarity to Indian nuclear policy through its Annual Residential Young Scholars' Nuclear Workshop (YSW), which it has conducted since 2008. It is the only workshop of its kind in India, and perhaps in South Asia, that offers an education on nuclear fundamentals through both political and technical instruction....
In infrasound propagation modelling, we face a large number of models with only a limited number of recorded signals to conduct statistical inference. Typically, standard practice consists of selecting atmospheric and propagation models from a class of models and then proceeding as if the selected models (or slightly perturbed versions of them) had generated the recorded signal. Such an...
A new methodological approach based on time series analysis for event screening categorization of beryllium and xenon background and outliers was tested. After the time series was detrended, the Lomb-Scargle spectrum can be computed for frequency domain analysis. Then, all frequencies were characterized in by a notch filter for P(ω) higher than a threshold, and reducing the time series to...
Business Intelligence (BI), as a collection of software, strategies, processes and services that support decision making in an enterprise has received a lot of attention in recent years. Some BI technologies have been around for more than a decade. They are normally packaged with all larger relational database management systems and include On-line Analytical Processing capabilities as well as...
Standard Station Interface (SSI) calibration module is a tool for execution of instrumental calibrations and review of calibration results. SSI supports main digitizers used by the IMS network: Guralp DM24, Nanometrics Europa-T and Quanterra Q330 and MariPro hydroacoustic station. SSI Calibration Command Line Interface (CLI) is a collection of 17 comprehensive programs which allow a user to...
Atmospheric transport modeling (ATM) is prerequisite for on-site inspection and source location estimation, so it is the critical point of the treaty. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was an energy accident at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima, initiated primarily by the tsunami following 9.0 magnitude on 11 March 2011. Literature of Fukushima accident source term...
CTBTO has been coping with and developing its educational activities and resources from various aspects so that these can contribute to achieve the treaty to enter into force through raising public awareness. Examples of practical education resources are as follows, Knowledge and Training Portal (KTP) whose various courses help users learn about the CTBT specifically, Global Partnership with...
Senegal has adopted the CTBT, fully ratified in 2001 and by the way, a sismic station has been established and a National data Center during the period 2006-2011.Since 2013, the cooperation is strenghtened in the field of human ressources development, and equipement providing in regard to help the goverment to fulfill its role and responsabilities on behalf of the treaty, but, in the same...
The problem of using infrasound monitoring data for sounding of the vertical profiles of wind velocity and temperature in the atmosphere is discussed. The sounding altitudes are in the range from 20 to 150 km. The surface explosions and volcano eruptions are suggested as the sources of acoustic pulses. The IMS data were analyzed for the following different events: the vapor cloud explosion...
The rapid development of the cloud computing and big data processing technology has great potential to improve the data transmission and processing activities in CTBT verification system. The distributed Cloud Data Center, which is based on Openstack platform, with the innovation of open, hardware and software decoupling and software defined network, can realize hardware resource pooling,...
Many detection systems detect either gamma or neutron radiation or combine the detection of both nuclear radiation types by integrating two detectors in one system. For hand-held systems a very small 3He-tube is often combined with a scintillation crystal of e.g. NaI or LaBr3. The recently developed detector material CLYC promises to detect gammas and neutrons simultaneously with good...
Due that Colombia has steep topography, the seismological data transport has been a challenge in order to provide it in Bogotá - Colombia, where the Colombian Seismological Network from Colombian Geological Survey (SGC) has its headquarter. In 1993, when it began to deploy infrastructure and seismological equipment, the telecommunications in the country had had an incipient development, so the...
The Source Physics Experiment (SPE) is a series of buried chemical explosions in granite and includes a comprehensive set of measurements. Among these are near-source accelerometers and unmanned aerial system (UAS)-borne photogrammetry. Data analysis is supported by numerical modeling with the goal of better understanding wave propagation phenomenology, particularly generation of shear....
Infrasound technology gained in the course of the last two decades a key role in monitoring several natural and man-made events, highlighting how much information about the source, as well as about the source-to-station propagation can be embedded in an infrasound signal. This concept applies in particular, but not exclusively, to volcano monitoring, where the understanding of all the source...
Four isotopes are of interest for radioxenon monitoring, Xe-135, Xe-133, Xe-133m, and Xe-131m. Many of the detectors in the International Monitoring System (IMS) use β-γ coincidence detection: where NaI(Tl) is the gamma detector and the plastic cell is the source container and beta detector. To characterize the source of radioxenon, ratios between the isotopes are used, which require accurate...
The Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG), the national Austrian Weather Service, is designated by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) as Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre (RSMC) Vienna (for backtracking only) and supports the CTBTO verification system with inverse atmospheric modelling activities on a global scale since its entry into operations. Besides, ZAMG...
Infrasound arrays IS31, Kurchatov and Makanchy form Kazakhstani infrasound network. Kazakh National Data Center also process data of IS46, Russia in addition to data of three above mentioned stations. Signal detection technique at KNDC is PMCC. The detection bulletins are input information for the automatic event location. Network processing started on June 2014. Simultaneously systematic...
The United States Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) operates real-time seismic monitoring systems that seamlessly integrate local, regional, national, and global seismic data for routine monitoring of earthquake activity and response to significant seismic events. These systems use real-time seismic data from more than 2,000 stations operated by more than 130...
Nonstationary signals are optimally represented in the joint time-frequency domain using time-frequency distributions (TFDs). The unwanted artefacts, which are by-products of TFDs quadratic nature, make TFD interpretation a challenging task. Recently proposed methods address the problem of artefact removal by employing compressive sensing (CS) techniques, with the unavoidable resolution loss...
Isotopic ratios of xenon emissions as well as of iodine emissions can be used to discriminate between releases from nuclear test explosions and normal operational releases from nuclear facilities. Radioisotopes of both elements can be detected by International Monitoring System (IMS) set up by the CTBTO. The scope of this study is to consider whether the ratio between the most frequently...
Between 2006 and September 2016, five confirmed nuclear tests occurred in The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The regional and teleseismic seismic waveforms show great similitudes suggesting the spatial closeness of the sources and their similar source radiation patterns. Using the available regional data, we perform the source moment tensor inversions of the five events, and we...
If a radioactive air sample taken at an IMS station is of relevance for a possible event, it is split into half and sent to two different CTBT radionuclide laboratories for further analysis. The radionuclide activity of relevant isotopes detected at the station might be lower than the minimum detectable activity (MDA) at the laboratory once the sample arrives. To estimate the detection...
During an OSI, inspectors should expect to have access to certain types of data for an inspection area prior to deployment, irrespective of where on Earth the OSI occurs. Satellite and aerial imagery, cartographic maps, digital elevation models, geological maps are all data types that can be found for almost any part of the planet prior to OSI deployment. We explore how to visualise such...
One of the modalities of CTBTO verification systems is the operation of radionuclide monitoring station for air particulates. The Philippines through the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute has been operating and maintaining the RN-52 since 2005. This station is co-located at the Weather and Radar Station of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration in...
The event in the Okavango Delta region of Botswana was the largest of the year 2016. The shaking was felt and reported by people living in the surrounding areas. Although the tremor was relatively small (3.7 ML Magnitude), the event prompt for study of the Kunyere and Thamalakane faults which together represent a southwestern extension of the East Africa Rift System (Modisi et al., 2000).The...
Cameroon has adopted the CTBT, fully ratified in February 2006 and by the way, a Radionuclide Station and a National Data Center have been established during the period 2006-2007. Since 2008, the cooperation is strengthened in the field of human resources development, and equipment providing in regard to help the government to fulfill its role and responsibilities on behalf of the treaty. One...
Correlation detectors have become integral components of seismic monitoring pipelines, offering sensitive detection and simultaneous event classification and location in situations where the relevant signals are known accurately. Often, however, the target signals are not known with certainty, but may be known only to be members of a particular class of signals. For example, the signals may...
Kenya hosts two IMS primary stations,IS32 and PS24. In previous years ,the cost of operation and maintenance was significantly high. in recent years these costs as well as the risks have greatly reduced due to the involvement(education) of the local community and the involvement of government agencies as stake holders. As a result of the above an enabling business environment has been created...
Hardware and electronic systems makers submit their products to testing before they are put into service. Where safety and operational criticality is vital then that testing is very rigorous. Once in service, keeping complex equipment operating requires a support program which can itself be complex and often costs more over time than the original hardware acquisition. Why is it that support...
Combining IMS seismological data with data from local and regional seismographs can provide many benefits to NDCs. We will provide three different examples from the Danish NDC: a) verification of the DPRK nuclear tests, b) identification of conventional explosions in the Danish territorial waters, and c) using IMS data to determine the depth of small Danish earthquakes. The Danish NDC operates...
This study presents the method of work and results obtained during a field campaign deploying various on-site inspection (OSI) equipment techniques in order to cross-calibrate the performance of OSI gamma radiation sensors. Airborne and ground-truth survey techniques are deployed over large areas, whereas in-situ high resolution gamma spectroscopy measurements are conducted at specific...
Three-dimensional seismic wavespeed structure of the crust and uppermost mantle in southern Africa was determined by tomographic inversion of absolute arrivaltimes of first P-waves picked from seismograms generated by tectonic earthquakes and mining-induced tremors recorded at local and regional distances by 82 broadband stations of the 1997–1999 Southern Africa Broadband Seismic Experiment,...
This work is aimed at assessing critical issues on sites response and earthquakes prediction, improve earthquakes location and better seismic hazards assessment for planning in Nigeria. Firstly, sediment depths in the Lower Benue Trough were collected; resonance frequency (Fo) and shear-wave velocities (Vs) were then computed. Secondly, average velocities were estimated from cross-correlation...
Shen et. al., 1996 method has been applied to the GPS measurements results in order to investigate crustal deformation of the Azerbaijan and surrounding areas. Compression observed along the Greater Caucasus, Gobustan, Kura depression, Nakhchivan and the border areas with Iran. Compression axis show that reduction of the Earth's crust in the Greater Caucasus happens towards N-NE direction. The...
The study of crustal thickness provides valuable information about the geology of a certain region, such as crustal composition, formation dynamics and tectonic evolution. Furthermore, it serves as an initial reference for velocity models. In order to fill out crustal information gaps in the Brazilian North and Central-West regions, Receiver Function and the H-k stacking techniques were...
Globally, one of the foremost multilateral treaties established by the United Nations (UN) to verify nuclear explosion activities around the world is the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test–Ban Treaty (CTBT). The Treaty bans any nuclear explosions anywhere by anyone on the planet. Compliance to the nuclear test ban requires understanding of the Treaty’s relevance and contribution to international peace...
As part of the 2015 NDC Preparedness Exercise (NPE15), the production of a large number of synthetic spectra was required both for Noble Gas and particulates technologies. The NPE15 control team requested the CTBTO to generate the largest portion of the particulate spectra with specified nuclides of interest and activity concentrations. Some spectra contain a very large number of radionuclides...
The hydroacoustic array system and national technical means of member states, coupled with the seismic system, radionuclide detection system, and even the infrasound system may give indications that a clandestine test has been carried out in international waters. The paper proposes that the CTBT use for analysis a previously conducted US test in international waters to determine the procedures...
In the fields of diplomacy, politics, and security, there are few individuals who do not understand the importance of the CTBT. However, in order to pressure modern governments and organizations, there must first be public demand and public awareness of the issues that the CTBT works with. Current efforts to raise public awareness are insufficient, they are not targeting, or poorly targeting...
Nigeria has demonstrated her strong resolve to support the universality of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by signing the treaty in 2000 and ratifying in 2001. This is in addition to participation in international workshops and ministerial meetings. While much effort is being made at the international level, it is important to assess the level of awareness of Nigerians on the...
The National Data Center Suriname (NDCSUR) operating since September 2012 is receiving Seismological data from three Seismic stations from Colombia, Bolivia and Brazil. This data is send to us from the International Data Center (IDC) in Vienna Austria on daily bases in near real time. If there is an event of interest in our region, we request for data from more stations and analyze it using...
The IMS hydroacoustic (HA) hydrophone network monitors the world’s oceans for signs of nuclear explosions since the early 2000’s. The wealth of data acquired by the IMS hydroacoustic stations is also used in civil and scientific applications. The present study focuses: i) on hydrophone data recorded during the tsunamigenic 2011 Tohoku earthquake with the purpose of estimating the directivity...
Destructive earthquake that occurred on December 7th 2016, in the western part of Aceh, caused damage to buildings and loss of life. We estimated this earthquake source parameters using regional broadband waveform data with the Cut and Paste (CAP) inversion method to better understand this earthquake and the seismic hazard in the region. Our results indicate that the best solution of this...
Prompt release of gases at the ground surface resulting from existing or explosively propagated vents has typically been considered the only mode of transport of detonation gases from an underground nuclear explosion (UNE) capable of giving rise to measurable levels of radioxenon gases in downwind atmospheric samples. With a model for thermally and barometrically driven post-detonation...
In 2016 last release of Extended NDC-in-a-box was installed and tuned for the purposes of UANDC. As VM with ENIAB is limited by size we made clear installation from source code to separate server. During the operational duty and routine data processing, at least 3 persons are using ENIAB software contemporaneously and in this connection the question of remote use of the same software in same...
Reliable measurements of radioxenon isotopes are essential for the International Monitoring System (IMS) as required for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). IMS measures continuously the four Xenon isotopes of interest for CTBT verification: 131mXe, 133mXe, 133Xe and 135Xe. The characterization of the global Xe isotopes background is very important for the accuracy of IMS...
In this study, we propose a design of a broad band seismometer for monitoring the vertical component of the ground velocity in the frequency band from 50 sec (25 mHz) up to 50 Hz with a sensitivity of 1500 V/m/sec. Our proposed seismometer uses a mass-leaf-spring suspension as a mechanical receiver to convert the variations in ground acceleration into displacements of the seismic mass relative...
Recently, the detection of two small seismic events which have occurred close to sites where North Korea carried out underground nuclear weapons tests were reported in literature. A seismic event – considered to be a small earthquake of magnitude 1.5, occurred on 12 May 2010 close to the site of 25 May 2009 underground nuclear test (UNT) in North Korea. Another seismic event of magnitude 2.1...
Three infrasound arrays with collocated or nearby installed seismometers are operated by the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) as the German NDC for the verification of the CTBT. Infrasound generated by seismoacoustic events is routinely detected at these infrasound arrays, but air-to-ground coupled acoustic waves occasionally show up in seismometer recordings as...
This study introduces a method of seismic threshold monitoring to assess an upper magnitude limit of a potential seismic event in a certain given geographical region. The method is based on ambient seismic background noise measurements at the individual IMS seismic stations in the year 2013 as well as on global distance correction terms for body wave magnitudes, which are calculated using the...
The availability of data and the ability to efficiently interpret those data in the context of an alleged Treaty violation are critical to the preparation of the Initial Inspection Plan during the launch phase of an On-Site Inspection. Data provided as national technical means can support authenticated data products from the CTBT International Data Centre. In this context, remotely sensed data...
Recently we analyzed infrasound data relevant to the North Korean underground nuclear tests since 2006 at the two IMS infrasound stations closest to the DPRK test site. As has also been found for national infrasound arrays in South Korea at closer distances, most of these tests can be detected acoustically at IMS stations IS45 in Russia and at IS30 in Japan at distances of some 400 km and...
Radionuclides have been conducted to determine the fission products Sr-90 and Pu-242 in water samples. Radionuclides are very much in nature, one of which is -90 strontium (Sr-90) and Plutonium - 242 (Pu-242) which is a specific radionuclide fission product. Sr-90 and Pu-242 from environmental samples is determined using the method of chemical separation. There are three steps to determine...
Abstract Zarqa governorate is one of the important governorates in Jordan. It is the second populated after Amman, the location of Zarqa gives the city a great importance because it lies on the main high ways leading to Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and power plants which gives this city a special importance. The Nakamura's technique is applied in this study for both areas; Zarqa city and...
The present work provides results of determining mechanisms of origin of water objects, including revealing of water exchange between different types of underground waters (fracture and ground waters), and their interrelation with surface waters. It was found that fracture waters (-121.6 ‰ for δ2Н and -16.6 ‰ for δ18О) are formed by means of feeding by local atmospheric precipitation of winter...
Mega-cities, specially when located in a high potential seismic region, are always threaten by huge damage because of earthquake. Decreasing the earthquake side effects is the main target of our developed low cost MEMS base accelerometer unit. There are more than 300 CGS gas stations distributed all over the Tehran city which can act like a bomb when an earthquake happens. There are lots of...
Nuclear weapons and arms control education is becoming increasingly important, both in educational environments and in society in general. There is a growing need to improve the capacities of universities, international institutions, and governments to promote evidence and fact-based social dialogue about nuclear weapons and related arms control agreement and treaties. At the University of...
The Regional Seismic Travel Time (RSTT) tomography model has been developed to improve travel time predictions for regional phases (Pn, Sn, Pg, Lg) in order to increase seismic location accuracy, especially for explosion monitoring. The RSTT model is specifically designed to exploit regional phases for location, especially when combined with teleseismic arrivals. The latest RSTT model (version...
Gamma spectrometry laboratories analyze environmental samples with low radionuclide content. The determination of low level activities is challenged by the problem of high background signals which can mask the events from a sample or increases the uncertainty of peaks that are found. A primary contributor to the background is terrestrial radiation resulting from naturally occurring...
Since 37Ar is produced in significant quantities when neutrons from a nuclear explosion activate calcium in the ground, measurements of 37Ar are among the most important made for nuclear explosion monitoring applications, including on-site inspections (OSI) under the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). Measurement of 37Ar is also among the more difficult measurements to make in field...
Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (PSHA) based on standard methodology still remains effective to predict earthquake probabilities particularly in longer time scales. In this work PSHA is performed for Georgia by improved version of the standard methodology developed in the frame of EMME project. A basic aspect of this new approach is to use hybrid empirical ground motion prediction...
• New detecting unit of conversion electrons was made in new geometry of 10 pieces Si-PIN diodes, disposed in an aluminum cylinder of height 35 mm and diameter 18 mm (~8cm3 volume) . Si-PIN detectors with a thickness of ~0.45 mm and an active area of ~1 cm2 were used. The parameters of the created detection unit was tested using gas that contains all four Xe radionuclides. New development of...
Optimizing the performance of the United States National Data Center (U.S. NDC) geophysical data processing system is critical for efficiently monitoring international compliance to nuclear test ban treaties. The U.S. NDC software stores system performance information for each data processing interval in a collection of semi-structured alphanumeric log files. On average, the system generates...
Recent developments at the UK National Data Centre, hosted by UK Radionuclide Laboratory GBL15, have significantly improved the data processing capabilities for IMS radionuclide data. GBL15 utilises the IDC-developed software packages including nms_client and rms_pipeline in order to receive data downloads and automatically analyse the files. These results are used as a foundation for further...
A well planned array geometry is fundamental in the construction of state-of-the-art infrasound arrays. The International Monitoring Division (IMS) has made a concerted effort to create new and improved tools to ply, when designing and planning the construction of a new and existing IMS network infrasound station. When using the tool, the following is considered: Number of array elements,...
In the world of seismology there are situations that we need to use a recording system in the place that there is no access to open sky or in a place with lots of electronic noises of cellphones or satellites. The question is what should to do in this situations to have a clean data from time point of view? Available GPS antenna are usually produce with a length of 5meters in the market. There...
For decades, gamma spectrometry data acquisition systems were based on analogue electronic modules. Developed at the beginning of the 1990s, digital data acquisition system democratized in the past 10 years. Since 2012 the R&D team in low level gamma spectrometry at CEA center of Bruyères-le-Châtel has started to use these systems. Digital electronics presents several advantages. First, all...
When the direct line of sight from a hydro-acoustic sensor to a source of an underwater sound is obstructed by land, the blocked signal may still be detected. Acoustic propagation around an island acts as a transfer function, changing the direction and duration of the sound source. Recordings made on CTBT hydro-acoustic stations in the Indian Ocean demonstrate acoustic redirection caused by...
Pattern Informatics can be used to predict seismic events. Three forms of patterns can be formed using Global seismological data. Temporal Patterns indicating time relationship between different natural seismic events that took place over the past years at least a two decades depicting their sequence towards forming a pattern. Spatial Patterns indicating the geographic locations of the events...
Over two decades ago, the Earthworm regional seismic processing system was introduced as a state-or-the-art analytical system for regional seismic event detection and analysis. Today it is still in wide spread use worldwide, despite amazing advances in distributed processing, cloud-based computing, data storage and edge-based analytics. The xQuake system, designed and built by the original...
The amplification of seismic wave is different from one location to another. This occurs because of differences in the thickness of sediment on top of bedrock. The aims of this researchs are to find an amplification value at each station and to determine areas which soft or hard soil. Area of this research is in Java with the coordinates of 5° S - 12° S and 105° E - 115° E. Using a simple...
I have two regular courses for more than ten years in school of IR, BLCU, which are “International Security” for undergraduate students, and “Arms Control & International Security” for graduate students. Since 2012, after I attended the CTBTO academic conference for my first time, I have purposely integrated CTBTO online courses into my regular courses. There are three major approaches to...
In Atbara area, many industrial factories, roads and bridges have been constructed. Geophysical techniques are mainly used in planning for these strategic projects and to study and determine the soil characteristics to avoid the associated problems during and after construction. In the present study shallow seismic refraction technique was carried out to determine the lateral extension and...
The river Nile is the longest river in the world. Many dams are located along it. The high dam is largest one and the longest monitored in terms of seismicity, water levels and crustal deformation. Seismicity recorded in the Aswan area between 1986 and 2015 was deeply investigated by applying different statistical techniques. The study of the seismic catalogue allowed us to distinguish between...
One problem with early warning and shutdown systems, is early detection of occurrence of an earthquake in the presence of local and false events. It could be a complicated problem specially when we want to detect an event with a few seconds of received signal. Early warning and automatic shutdown systems, if we discern local noise mistakenly as an earthquake, the least consequences of this...
The CTBT provides a robust monitoring and verification regime for the ban on nuclear test explosions established by the United Nations member states. The Treaty employs four global monitoring technologies namely seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide to monitor and detect any signs of nuclear explosions anywhere on the planet. Provisional Technical Secretariat (PTS) data and...
The focal mechanisms for earthquakes in and around Egypt is calculated during (2004 -2016) using the waveform data recorded by the Egyptian National Seismological Network (ENSN) and the International Data Center (IDC) of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). These solutions are computed by joining P, S_H, S_V polarities and S_V/P, S_H/P and S_V/S_H amplitude ratios...
The seismic array station located near Eskdalemuir in the UK is part of the auxiliary seismic network of the International Monitoring System (IMS). The station was originally installed in 1962 and has been in operation since then. In 2009, the station was significantly upgraded to modern IMS standards. The upgraded 20 pits of the array house a new broadband sensor (30 s to 50 Hz 3V...
The installation of HA04 Crozet took place during December 2016 in exceptionally harsh weather, which added a further challenge on top of the known local scenario that includes a complex bathymetry and strong underwater currents. A number of engineering and operational decisions adopted during the preparatory phases of this installation made it possible to manage the risks and contributed to...
In this paper, we discuss research in improving shallow depth estimates by adding enhancements to our Cepstral processing. These enhancements include: 1) the employment of a predictive lifter to the Complex Cepstrum, which should improve the depth phase removal; thereby, giving a better estimate of the P-phase; 2) the effectiveness of the lifter in removing a second explosion from the...
Software development efforts at the CTBTO International Data Centre (IDC) for particulate data processing over the recent years focused on boosting the consistency of automatic results and reducing the work load on Analysts in interactive mode. The presentation compiles the key enhancements and new features of the software modules for particulate sample data as deployed in IDC Operations and...
For the CTBTO to enhance public awareness of the CTBT among youth, social media must be the primary focus. Itâs harder than ever to capture peopleâs attention with social media because of its ephemeral nature, so our message will educate young people in a fast, easy and effective nature. The public information campaign would start with a minute long, simple, video informing people about...
In December 2016, a multi-year IMS project culminated in the successful establishment of hydroacoustic station HA04 in the Crozet Islands (France). The installation of HA04 marked an important milestone for CTBTO, as it was the final (eleventh) hydroacoustic station to be installed as part of the International Monitoring System (IMS). While still in its initial testing phase, HA04 sends...
We have combined seismological data of the National Seismological Network of Colombia and the CTBTO program for estimating the P-to-S and S-to-P receiver functions beneath Colombia and adjacent regions to make a first-order approximation of the thickness of the Lithosphere-Asthenosphere Boundary (LAB) in the NW South America. An iterative time-domain deconvolution process was carried out...
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea(DPRK) has carried out five underground nuclear tests since 2006 at P’unggyeri test site. For DPRK’s UNEs, the explosions have been performed almost at closely located test sites. In this case, with an assumption of well coupled explosions, estimates on the relative depth and yield of UNE can be attained by a spectral division of the two seismograms...
A seismic moment tensor is a 3x3 symmetric matrix that provides a compact representation of seismic events within Earth’s crust. We develop an algorithm to estimate moment tensors and their uncertainties from observed seismic data. The moment tensor uncertainties allow us to better discriminate among source types and to discuss physical processes for the events. For a given event, the...
I estimate the source time functions and yields of the North Korean 2009 and 2013 events (NK09 and NK13) directly from seismograms recorded at Mudanjiang (MDJ) seismological observatory. The path effect between source and receiver is eliminated by finding a ratio filter that shapes the NK09 seismogram to the NK13 seismogram. Neglecting noise, convolution of this filter with the source time...
In this paper, we use equalization of seismograms from nearby explosions recorded at common stations to estimate source parameters. Expressing waveforms O1(t) and O2(t) from two explosions of yield W1 and W2 with corresponding DOB of H1 and H2 as S1(t,W1,H1)G1(t,W1,H1) and S2(t,W2,H2)G2(t,W2,H2), respectively where S and G represent the source and Green's functions, we can argue that...
Depending on the prevailing weather conditions, the future weather can be anything from very predictable to very unpredictable. "Ensemble forecasts" (essentially many forecasts started from slightly different initial conditions) aim to represent this varying level of uncertainty (arising from the effects of Chaos). Because ensemble forecasts give us a range of possible outcomes, they cannot in...
Five years (2010-2015) of infrasound arrivals, included in International Data Centre (IDC) analyst-reviewed bulletins, detected across the International Monitoring System (IMS) show clusters in West Eurasia of up to 268 infrasound only events (no associated seismic phases). Ground truth information is unavailable for these clusters, although one large cluster (North Sea region) is associated...
The CTBTO's International Data Centre is in the process of implementing NetVISA to perform the automatic association and location steps in the next generation IDC software. NetVISA (Arora et al., 2013) applies a Bayesian approach with a forward physical model using probabilistic representations of the propagation, station capabilities, background seismicity and noise statistics to obtain the...
A new, inline framework that combines the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with the Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory model (HYSPLIT) has been developed by the Air Resources Laboratory to improve atmospheric transport and dispersion (ATD) predictions. This inline model, herein referred as WRF-HYSPLIT, has been shown to have some advantages over the traditional...
The International Monitoring System (IMS) is based on four technologies: seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide. The hydroacoustic network, which consists of underwater hydrophone stations and T-stations (on-land seismometers), is essential for detection and location of underwater sources. Hydrophone stations are more sensitive than T-stations and provide azimuth information...
Seismic moment tensors are summation of force couples that are scale invariants, symmetric and independent on the coordinate system used to describe the source. The seismic moment tensors for certain types of sources, such as volcanic earthquakes and nuclear explosions are expected to contain an isotropic component and have volume change. Whereas in case double couple deviatoric tensor is...
In the past years major advances have been done concerning the development of the techniques used within an OSI. A critical task is the verification of the presence of a cavity caused by the underground nuclear explosion. One method to investigate the geophysical properties of a cavity allowed by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty is referred to as resonance seismometry - using passive...
The apparent low utilization of the CTBT Educational Resources (CER) by members of the academics from the West African region motivated this study. This is focussed on determining the level of awareness of the benefits of the CER among the Academics from the West African Region and what can be done to enhance the use of the CER in the region in order to promote CTBT Education and in...
The accurate measurement of the noble gases released by a Radioisotope Production Facilities (RPF) requires the design of an optimized monitoring system. The design process must take into account the characteristics of the radiation detectors and the engineering variables involved in the measurement. In addition, the field start-up experience is a key feature for the evolution and optimization...
To date, the main center of special monitoring (MCSM) is the only one structure in Ukraine, which is able to perform the tasks of nuclear tests control and this is a priority in the activities of the center. On the basis of MCSM deployed National Data Centre. The existing distributed system of collection, processing and analysis of information allowed to detect and identify all known nuclear...
S-waves are characterized by lower velocity than the P-waves therefore they provide more detailed images of the subsurface. The geologic and man-made structures can be detected more precisely on the S-wave sections than on the P-wave ones. However, the attenuation for the S-waves is higher than for the P-waves resulting in lower signal-to-noise ratio. That is why the S-wave data acquisition...
Expert Technical Analysis (ETA) is a role that the IDC plays to provide higher-level research products on data from the IMS and other relevant data to improve the estimated values for standard event parameters and assist State Parties in identifying the source of specific event. As depth is one of these values, we focus on its improving using modern advances in seismic modeling. First part of...
Throughout November 2016, and in January 2017, the IMS H03 (Juan Fernandez, Chile) hydroacoustic station detected prolonged series of short-duration high-frequency signals at an approximate 1 minute interval, consistent with an off-coast ship-based survey. The signals could also be observed, at much attenuated level, at the H11 (Wake Island, US) station. The quantity of signals and their SNR...
This paper addresses issues of related to atmospheric transport with account of deposition of dispersed and gaseous radionuclides originated by underground nuclear explosion (UNE). UNE-originated radionuclides may be released in the atmosphere either completely just after immediate accidental penetration of soil, or partially within several hours after UNE. And even if UNE is contained and its...
Installation and implementation of the Extended NDC in a Box for Mongolian NDC was completed successfully. Using new features in Extended NDC in a Box we have following benefits (DTK-GPMCC, DTK-DIVA and DTK-Jade) for advanced research for seismic and infrasound network. It also provides new tools (Webgrape(ATM), Norfy and OpenSpectra) are ready for processing, visualizing and analyzing...
The Platte underground nuclear explosive test occurred in a tunnel at the U.S. Nevada Test Site on 14 April 1962. The test vented quickly (1.5 seconds) and radiation was detected at locations up to 200 km away. Using radioisotope measurements at the Queen City Summit location and HYbrid Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) modeling of dispersion and deposition, a release...
The International Monitoring System (IMS) is one of the four elements of the CTBTO verification regime. A part of the IMS is composed of seismic, infrasound and hydroacoustic stations participating to the underground, air, and underwater explosions monitoring. The minimum requirement in term of data availability (DA) for each of station is 98%. This means that each station should be able to...
For the International Monitoring System (IMS) it is difficult to find low-magnitude aftershocks of small underground nuclear tests using only standard detection and phase association methods. At the same time, signals from thousands of aftershocks per day following Mw8+ earthquakes are difficult to separate, and thus, to recover the whole sequence. Both tasks are important for the...
Context. The verification regime of the CTBT focuses highly on radionuclides. Currently four xenon isotopes are used to distinguish between civil source emissions and those of suspected nuclear tests. Although the use of xenon isotopes is theoretically well understood and established, its applicability may be limited by anthropogenic background and detection of only some of the four isotopes...
Free Space Optics (FSO) systems can provide high data bite rates up to 10 GB/s. They are also easy to install and low cost compared to wired optical fiber. In that regard, FSO can play a key role in link back-up for the infrastructure of the CTBTO in the field and even for the infrastructure at the headquarters in Vienna in terms of rapid deployment for securing links and data rate transmission.
FSUE "VNIIA" is the leading organization of the State Atomic Energy Corporation "Rosatom" regarding the aspects of the implementation of the CTBT. It currently carries out activities in the following directions: - Repair and modernization of technical equipment at International Monitoring System (IMS) stations located on the territory of the Russian Federation; - Scientific and methodological...
As part of regular laboratory operations, GBL15 (the UK CTBTO certified radionuclide laboratory) participates in annual Proficiency Test Exercises (PTEs) organised by the CTBTO. GBL15 consistently achieves the top `A' grade in these exercises using dedicated HPGe detector systems; to achieve the sensitivity required these are specifically designed to use low-background materials, and are...
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has developed and commercialized many advanced radiation detection technologies that have become widely adopted and are used around the world. One of our most recent developments is the Germanium-Gamma-Imager (GeGI) System. This novel system combines a mechanically-cooled segmented planar HPGe detector with an optical camera. The GeGI, identifies the...
Underground nuclear explosions lead to the formation of cavities partly filled with magma contributed by the surrounding rocks during cooling, where nuclear reactions take place under the form of multiparent-multidaughter decay chains with half-lives covering many orders of magnitude. In the framework of the International Monitoring System, xenon isotopes decayed from their parent iodine,...
An important component of monitoring underground nuclear explosions is a realistic understanding of the non-prompt post-detonation processes and changes in the environment that produce observable physical and radio-chemical signatures. As such, the material and fracture properties that are brought to bear on noble gas migration within various lithologies is essential. Here we present an...
We present data and analysis of a seismic data collect at the HADDOCK underground nuclear explosive test in Yucca Flat, a sedimentary basin on the Nevada National Security Site, USA. HADDOCK was conducted in 1964 with an announced yield of less than 20 kt and depth-of-burial of 364 meters. The test is unusual in that the collapse of the test cavity did not reach the ground surface. As such,...
Global Infrasound Association algorithms are an important area of active development at the IDC. These algorithms are incorporated into the automatic processing system for verification technologies, with a focus on enhancing association and signal characterization. The overall objective is to reduce the number of associated infrasound arrivals that are rejected from automatic bulletins when...
We continue to develop more advanced models of Earth’s global seismic structure with specific focus on improving predictive capabilities for future seismic events. Our most recent version of the model combines high-quality P and S wave body-wave travel times and surface-wave group and phase velocities into a joint (simultaneous) inversion process to tomographically image Earth’s crust and...
This research conducts an analysis of the production of nuclear energy, the nuclear tests and its negative impacts on the planet. Currently there is a dangerous and contradictory discussion that many governments make of nuclear energy, showing it as an energy that does not contribute to the generation of CO2, which reduces dependence on the use and exploitation of hydrocarbons, justifying less...
The seismic Ground Truth procedure proposed by Bondar et al. was applied at San Calixto Observatory not only to improve seismic location also the velocity model and focal mechanics bulleting were improved, furthermore, the deployment of temporally seismic station in our country has allowed us to have a better azimuthal coverage for seismic events. Taking advantage of IMS station LPAZ deployed...
One of the principal considerations in nuclear explosion monitoring is to consider the radioxenon isotopic ratios from each possible source and how the sources of individual radioxenon observations might be discriminated from each other. The past observations of atmospheric radioxenon made by the CTBT IMS noble gas network, specifically those from the Fukushima accident in 2011, provides the...
We consider a hypercomplex and high-order (tensorial) representation of multichannel seismic data as they are recorded by the International Monitoring System of the CTBTO with processing within the context of the corresponding multidimensional model. In particular, we discuss an approach to construct multidimensional master-event waveform templates for cross-correlation-based detection and...
A HYSPLIT inverse system based on 4D-Var data assimilation and a Lagrangian dispersion transfer coefficient matrix (TCM) has been developed and successfully applied to several implementations. For instance, Chai et al. (2015) recovered cesium-137 release rates from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident using air concentration measurements around the globe finding consistent temporal variations...
A major focus of Phase 2 of the IDC Re-engineering project has been the establishment of the requirements for the re-engineered system. This process included the development of detailed User Interface Storyboards (UISs) that graphically depict the basic layouts of the new user interfaces and capture key user interactions. Development of these UISs in close collaboration with expert users is...
The second phase of the IDC Re-engineering project has developed a software architecture to guide development of the next-generation IDC waveform processing system. The architecture describes system-wide principles and features desirable in the new system, including definitions of common system patterns, fundamental mechanisms (e.g. data storage, processing control), and interfaces that...
Resource constraints impact the cost effective and timely execution of seismic sustainment activities. An analysis of AFTAC configuration management processes identified deficiencies in baseline plan development, monitoring procedures, and resource allocation. Through decomposition of work scope into its lowest manageable level, project engineers and configuration managers were able to assess...
During the monitoring compliance of the Treaty, a big problem for the Ukrainian seismic networks are mining explosions. Distinguish of industrial explosions is possible by number of criteria (time of the explosion and the day of the week, power, location). But in the same regions periodically there are earthquakes, including those due to induced seismicity. Separately, there are events caused...
The most effective element of MCSM seismic network is seismic station PS45. Identification of the seismic signal from UNE carried out by determining the cross-correlation between the first arrivals of registered seismic signal and a previously registered signal from UNE, selected as the reference. Determination of duration of seismic signal record for the implementation of the correlation...
Eruption of hot mud volcano in East Java(LUSI) is a disaster that resulted in enormous material loss. This eruption located in areas rich in oil and gas. Eruption is very threatening a lot of people, because there are a lot of pipelines are located in this area. The existence of this eruption is not the first in the research area,there were already 13 times occurred in the different location...
Xenon emissions from medical isotope production facilities (MIPFs) and other nuclear installations affect verification capability of the International Monitoring System (IMS) of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO). While the best way to address the issue is mitigating emissions at the source, retro-fitting mitigation systems in existing MIPFs can be very costly....
Our work is motivated by a partnership between the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO/IOC), and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that is working towards integration of seismic sensors into the next generation of trans-oceanic telecommunication...
A three-dimensional atmospheric dispersion model, Lagrangian Atmospheric Dose Assessment System (LADAS) has been developed by the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) for the purpose of predicting and assessing atmospheric dispersion of radionuclides released into the air when a nuclear accident occurs elsewhere around the world. It was successfully employed to the environmental...
This research performs an analysis of the flaws in governance systems and public policies concerning the prohibition of nuclear tests in the world, as well as their contradictions and impacts. Since there is a dangerous and contradictory discussion that many governments make of nuclear energy, this discussion does not adequately recognize the negative effects of nuclear energy and its...
Sixty-nine of the 80 CTBT IMS particulate stations are already installed and 64 stations are also certified. Some of these stations are situated in very remote locations, and operational conditions often include very harsh climate conditions and austere infrastructures. In order to improve data availability and quality for these stations and also to sustain long term operations, the IMS...
Based on the IMS statistical assessments done on historically recorded earthquakes in Tunisia and the Mediterranean, it was noticed a certain shortness in locating all events triggered in Tunisia. This issue may result essentially from the geodynamic structure of the country location as well as from the insufficient number of seismic stations in that area. Consequently, a risk that a suspect...
The seismometers can detect not only the seismic events but also other natural vibrations such as cultural activities,wind and ocean waves which referred to seismic noise.Seismic noise exists everywhere on the Earth surface so it can mask seismic signals completely.In this study,we analyzed seismic background noise of BRTR array(PS-43) which is one of International Monitoring System primary...
The first decade of XXI was noted by running of five new seismic arrays on the territory of Kazakhstan. Its construction and operation is the result of the international cooperation of the IGR with the CTBTO and AFTAC. The arrays contribution into global and regional monitoring is very significant. In the system of international monitoring, Kazakhstan seismic arrays are among the most...
The simulation of atmospheric plumes requires a holistic multi-scale modeling approach accounting for uncertainty. Such an approach is needed for close-range monitoring and for simulating time-varying releases over complex topography. Our approach will accommodate variable source terms and the resolution of surface meteorological complexities through the development of advanced large-eddy...
Reducing the prediction error of seismic-phase travel times leads directly to improvement in earthquake location accuracy. One-dimensional (1D) velocity models are most commonly used to calculate seismic phase travel times because computer codes are readily available and the computations are inexpensive. Travel time predictions based on 1D models are accurate to within 1 to 2 seconds at...
Monitoring of underground nuclear tests is based on the Primary Seismic Network of the International Monitoring System (IMS) consisting of 3-C stations and arrays. Detection of signals is the principal task of stations. The capability of finding an event of interest depends on station sensitivity, i.e. detection threshold and reliability of signal attributes such as arrival time,...
Currently many geophysical organizations are already using different forms of cloud services and at the same time retaining control over the data processing. Such organizations get highly customized and sophisticated data processing environments with an optimal priceâperformance ratio by combining public and private cloud infrastructure within a hybrid or multi-cloud solution. In addition...
The monitoring community expressed desires to improve the RASA particulate radionuclide system MDC to increase network sensitivity. Before investing and developing new sampling technology, GDMS investigated minor configuration changes to improve the RASA MDC. MDC may be improved by enhancing the detector signal-to-noise ratio or increasing air flow. Focusing on detector signal-to-noise, GDMS...
Seismic station metadata includes such parameters as location, digitizer parameters and sensor calibrations. Accurate metadata are essential for effective nuclear explosion monitoring, allowing researchers to analyze vast amounts of seismic data throughout the world. Yet, our research demonstrates problems with the accuracy of seismic station metadata, particularly calibration metadata....
The Source Physics Experiments (SPE) are a series of well-instrumented chemical non‑nuclear explosions at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) designed to improve the understanding of seismic wave generation and propagation from explosions. The 5-ton SPE-5 on April 26, 2016, and 2.2 ton SPE-6 on October 12th, 2016, were the last of the Phase I series of six underground chemical non-nuclear...
Although the earthquake prediction is still in controversial for the seismologists, there are significant progress in the detection of earthquake precursor using geomagnetic data. We developed the Earthquake Precursor Monitoring System (EPMS) based on the geomagnetic data recorded in the Geomagnetic Stations located in the Sumatera. The seismomagnetic anomaly is calculated and analyzed weekly...
The presentation is focused on equipment challenges for IMS seismic and infrasound networks. As per Operational Manuals, stations of both networks have to meet requirements for data authentication, data buffering, data availability with less than five min delay when transmitted to IDC and accurate control of absolute and relative timing for data samples. Developed Standard Station Interface...
The infrasound component of the International Monitoring System (IMS) is composed of sixty stations. Forty-nine of them are already certified and transmit data in near real-time to the International Data Centre, Vienna, Austria. Each infrasound station is composed of an array of infrasound measurement systems capable of measuring micropressure changes produced at ground by infrasonic wave...
Infrasound technology as part of the verification regime plays a significant role in monitoring compliance with the CTBT. Low frequency acoustic waves under certain conditions can propagate thousands of kilometres until they arrive at infrasound arrays of the International Monitoring System (IMS). Recorded data are transmitted to the International Data Centre (IDC) and used for detection and...
Eight Annex 2 countries must ratify CTBT in order for it to enter into force; five of these are located in regions of the world challenged by longstanding interstate conflicts that are intimately tied to nonproliferation and disarmament efforts. The CTBT’s ratification by these five countries would lay the groundwork for broader regional peace and stability. In spite of strong rationale for...
ABSTRACT: Collaboration between CTBTO and Port Moresby Geophysical Observatory (PMGO) has reached extra heights in terms of achievements in IMS operated networks in Papua New Guinea. The regional seismic monitoring stations of IMS, one of which is located in Port Moresby, AS-75PMG including the National Data Centre (NDC) receive processed earthquake data at PMGO via internet from USGS-NEIC....
For the purpose of monitoring for compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), the International Monitoring System (IMS) is being established that includes 40 sensor systems for atmospheric xenon radioactivity, 28 respectively 27 of which were in operation at least for part of the first two months following the two nuclear tests in 2016. Five underground nuclear tests were...
Incident management in Operations Centre encompasses the incident handling and resolution processes. Incidents are, for example an unexpected data outage, may be identified by station operators, or by the Operations Centre through an automated scripts. Any incidents are recorded using the IMS reporting System (IRS). IRS was created as a way to structure and record email correspondence between...
To accurately interpret infrasound arrivals at International Monitoring System (IMS) arrays requires understanding of low-frequency acoustic propagation in the atmosphere. This is often achieved using numerical acoustic propagation modeling. The Parabolic Wave Equation (PWE) uses an approximated Helmholtz equation, obtained for paraxial (i.e. near-horizontal) propagation, and has been...
The CTBT, once ratified, would be enormously beneficial for the United States and global security. There are many factors which block ratification, including a lack of communication between scientists and policy makers. The CTBT has languished for so long, that now we must not only revitalize the actors currently responsible for treaty entry-into-force, but also energize the upcoming group of...
Starting from 1994, the monitoring network of the RSE IGR mainly consisting of sensitive seismic arrays of different configuration has been operating on the territory of Kazakhstan. Seismicity monitoring of Kazakhstan has revealed a significant number of earthquakes at regions that were traditionally considered as aseismic. A range of earthquakes is related to places of active induced effect....
In the context of the Atmospheric Transport Modelling (ATM) Challenge 2016, we simulated the Xe-133 concentrations resulting from emissions by the ANSTO facility in Eastern Australia at various IMS noble gas stations. The stations are located at a wide range of geographical areas, from Australia over the Pacific to South America. All simulations were based on ECMWF 0.125 degree meteorological...
In the past, the impact of a major regional radioxenon emitter on the detections at International Monitoring System (IMS) nobles gas systems were examined in two atmospheric transport (ATM) challenges. These two International challenges defined the task to predict the impact of known radioxenon releases from a strong regional source on radionuclide stations of the CTBT International Monitoring...
Modeling infrasonic propagation in the atmosphere can be a computationally intensive exercise due to the dynamic and non-stationary nature of the propagation medium. Propagation simulation tools often utilize mathematical approximations to the acoustic wave equation to make obtaining a prediction for propagation effects more feasible. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have...
On March 23, 2015 and September 16, 2015 two major earthquakes occurred in Chile that is within the South America continental shelf and territory. This territory is covered by six IMS infrasound stations (IS02AR, IS08BO, IS09BR, IS13CL, IS14CL and IS41PA). Using these infrasound stations coupled by seismic stations the two events were analysedto test the operational readiness of the IMS...
Infrasound isolation chambers are used to isolate sensors from ambient conditions in order to perform calibrations of the sensors being evaluated. Calibrations are typically performed on sensors to be deployed within a monitoring station. Calibrations identifying that a sensor meets performance requirements are necessary before a station can be certified for inclusion within the International...
Characteristic features of infrasound waves observed in the Antarctic represent a physical interaction relating surface environment in the continental margin and surrounding Southern Ocean. Source location of several infrasound events are demonstrated by using combination of two array deployments along a coast of the Lützow-Holm Bay (LHB), East Antarctica, for data retrieving period in January...
We present SIG-VISA (SIGnal-based Vertically Integrated Seismic Analysis), a next-generation approach to Bayesian seismic monitoring. This work builds upon the success of NET-VISA, recently recommended for production deployment at the IDC. SIG-VISA extends the detection-based NET-VISA approach by modeling full continuous seismic waveforms. Bayesian inference in this model yields a new...
AWE recently developed a Cosmic Veto system for use with CTBTO detectors at UK laboratory GBL15. The technology used for this has subsequently been adapted and optimised so that Cosmic Veto systems can be retrofitted to existing IMS manual station designs. During October 2016, in collaboration with the PTS and Enviroearth, a 'Hot Spare’ system was installed at RN67 St Helena in the South...
Worcester Polytechnic Institute is committed to the education and training of scientists for the needs of the new century by connecting science content to issues of critical local, national, and global importance. In our recently developed curriculum in the Nuclear Science and Engineering field, we have integrated CTBT as a tool to illustrate and discuss a variety of topics including new...
The visualisation of large, disparate geospatial datasets is extremely important during an On Site Inspection (OSI). There is a requirement for inspectors to be able to integrate data gathered from many different techniques and to represent them, in their geographic context, within an appropriate cartographic framework. AWE has begun testing of a commercial software package called GeoVisionary...
The integration of stations of the global network IMS of the CTBTO to the OVSICORI-UNA geophysical monitoring network including auxiliary and primary seismic stations near Costa Rica such as: PCRV, ROSC, BDFB. The integration of IMS stations into the local network is done with the SeisComp3 acquisition system located at the National Data Centre in Costa Rica and integrated into the system of...
FLEXPART is a Lagrangian particle dispersion transport model which is originally designed for calculating the long-range and mesoscale dispersion of air pollutants from point sources. RODOS is also a Lagrangian particle dispersion model which has been specially designed to be used in the emergency planning. The main advantage of the RODOS model is that it can work on a very high resolution and...
The CTBT serves humanity in both ways through promoting nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament as well as saving lives. Although its central mission is to detecting nuclear explosions, the huge data also provides tsunami warning and better understanding the nature. We propose here to introduce m-Science systems as such, comprising three main subjects of sensing, computing and dissemination...
The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) has been developing and testing NET-VISA (Arora et al., 2013), a Bayesian automatic event detection and localization program, and evaluating its performance in a realistic operational mode. In our preliminary testing at the CTBTO, NET-VISA shows better performance than its currently operating...
Atmospheric transport modelling allows to determine the possible source regions of airborne radionuclides measured by for instance the International Monitoring System. This makes it a valuable tool for the verification of the CTBT. However, the output from such models contain uncertainties that are difficult to quantify. Given the importance of a correct interpretation of the ATM output, an...
A large quantity of multi-variate, technical data will be collected during an OSI, and the IT members must be able to see all of that data in its geographic context. Without an integrated and intuitive platform to display such data, important information could be over-looked. Deciding how to display technical data is not a trivial task and will vary extensively from technique to technique. In...
Due to subsurface movement along karstic fracture zones a sink hole with a surface diameter of 8 m appeared in the vicinity of a small town in 2001. Later the hole was filled up and the landscape was remediated. In 2016 a geophysical survey was organized in the site in order to monitor the quality of the remediation and observe the possibilities of the investigation of buried sink holes as an...
At the region of the west Kazakhstan there were no constant seismic observations for a long period of time. In 1994, seismic station AKTK was put into operation at the region of Mugodzhar Range; in 2005, at the same place, the auxiliary station of the IMS AS059 was installed. In 2003, a small aperture seismic array ABKAR was run. Absence of suitable velocity model for this territory, finally,...
Atmospheric gravity and infrasonic waves can be exited seismic activities such as earthquake and tsunami. If the tsunami and earthquake are strong enough, the waves can propagate to a height of the ionosphere so that fluctuations in the ionosphere in the period order of atmospheric gravity and infrasonic waves can appear in the ionosphere. Monitoring system of ionosphere waves associated with...
The radionuclide monitoring network of comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty International Monitoring System (IMS) consists of 80 radionuclide stations and 16 radionuclide laboratories. Forty of these stations shall also be capable of monitoring for the presence of relevant noble gases and radioxenon monitoring became the key component of the verification regime. Four xenon radioisotopes of...
Results have been obtained that make it possible to detect infrasound signals based on minimization of false alarm probability using data from pressure and wind velocity measurement channels. An algorithm for creating a multichannel selector performance characteristic has been developed using likelihood ration as per results of background measurements at the pressure and wind velocity channels...
Jordan Seismological Observatory (JSO) began its routine operation in September 1983. JSO is observing seismic events around the hour, doing the analysis, assessment and archiving, preparing seismic maps and seismic hazard maps data exchanging with universal observatories periodically and when needed in order to achieve complete set of data for better results providing seismic data to local...
Kr-85 monitoring in USSR-Russia ended in 1993, at that time it concentration activity was 0.9 -0.92 Bq/m3. The monitoring of Xe and Kr-85 radionuclides was renewed in August 2006, and was arranged at the sampling station in Cherepovets city, located 220 km north of the Kalinin NPP. A balloon was filled with the Kr-Xe gas mixture with charcoal and analysed on the Radium Institute. For the...
This work focus on detections of La-140 and Ba-140 from particles stations of International Monitoring Stations IMS. These two isotopes are part of relevant radionuclides of CTBT and are sometimes detected with abnormal concentrations. The mapping of this background and the analysis of their time series level is a helpful tool than can be used to characterize the activity background of both...
Certified laboratories are an essential component of the IMS network. One of their duties is to perform in-depth analysis of anomalous radionuclide samples collected in the field. FRL08 laboratory is candidate to noble gas certification. Radioxenon analysis is far more challenging than analysis of particulate filters: samples are gaseous which makes them prone to leaks and memory effect,...
Cross-correlation methods have been demonstrated by several groups to improve detection capability (~ tenfold) and location precision (~ hundredfold), when applied on local and near-regional scales. We are finding practical ways to achieve comparable results in application to broad areas, and have succeeded with fixed-window-length three-component Lg-waves in the 0.5 to 5 Hz passband recorded...
The International Monitoring System network consists of hundreds of facilities, composed of four different technologies with a variety of designs, deployed in diverse environments around the globe. The sustainment of this network with a high level of availability is challenging and requires extensive resource planning for its optimization. The PTS has already developed a sparing capability to...
Inaudible sound, i.e., infrasound, is generated by glaciers while moving and cracking and during calving events. Such sounds can be continuously monitored with microbarometer arrays. Changes in the rate of events can be retrieved with a resolution of a few seconds. Applying array processing techniques enables the identification of individual sources over ranges of tens, in this case, to...
The isotopic signatures (δ18O, δ2H and tritium) and patterns of dissolved-ion concentrations in the groundwater, coupled with understanding of the three-dimensional geological framework, are used to conceptualize the groundwater flow model and recharge-discharge mechanisms in this complex hydrogeological environment. Most groundwater samples lay close to the Addis Ababa LMWL indicating...
By using IMS data from 2009 to 2015 of I17CI and I11CV infrasound stations, we study in 0.1Hz to 0.3Hz frequency band, with GPMCC software of NDC-in-Box, the microbaroms in summer et winter periods. We find that the microbaroms detected in winter period by both station comes from the north Atlantic (upper to 30°N). In summer (Jun, July and August), the microbaroms detected are located on...
IS42 is located in the Azores islands, in the middle of the North Atlantic and is one of International Monitoring System (IMS) infrasound stations, able to detect reliably 1-kiloton explosions at ranges of up to 3000 km or more. On the behalf of the ARISE2 project, collaborative research between UNIFI and the University of the Azores, towards the characterization of extreme atmospheric...
To investigate the transport of xenon emissions, the Provisional Technical Secretariat (PTS) operates an Atmospheric Transport Modelling (ATM) system based on the Lagrangian Particle Dispersion Model FLEXPART. The air mass trajectory provides a "link" between a radionuclide release and a detection confirmed by radionuclide measurements. The aim of this study is to investigate the long-range...
Malawi lies within the East African Rift System (EARS) that runs through Lake Tanganyika, Lake Malawi to the Ulema graben in Mozambique. It falls within one of the seismically active zones of the world. Malawi has experienced earthquakes ranging from small to moderate with some being so destructive, like the one on 9th March 1989 in Salima, and Karonga on the 19th December 2009, both along the...
This talk presents recent projects that combine art and science to assess the impacts of the 67 nuclear weapons tests conducted in the Marshall Islands by the United States. An award-winning documentary on this topic, produced by Columbia University students, will be screened. Also covered will be the adventures and findings of a recent three-week boat journey in the Marshall Islands,...
Sixty-seven nuclear tests were conducted on two atolls in the northern Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. These tests produced radioactive fallout, which even today gives rise to radiation measurable above naturally occurring background levels. Rather than obtain new data, recent estimates of contamination levels in the northern Marshall Islands use measurements made decades ago to...
The most important indicators for a UNE during an OSI are the radioactive xenon isotopes Xe-131m, Xe-133 and Xe-133m and the radioactive argon isotope Ar-37. In the assessment of a detection of these nuclides it is important to have knowledge about the levels that can be expected due to the natural background. Therefore, it is interesting to simultaneously measure the background levels of...
A series of measurements have been undertaken at a test bed site on the Nevada National Security Site as part of a large scale subsurface gas migration experiment. Samples have been collected and analyzed for Ar-37. The Ar-37 is expected to be present in shallow soil gas as a result of natural production and at much deeper depths as part of the gas migration experiment. Radiotracers (Ar-37 and...
According to documents of the Nicaraguan Institute of Territorial Studies (INETER), the Concepción volcano, which emerges from Lake Cocibolca, is one of the most dangerous volcanoes in Nicaragua, Concepción volcano is one of two volcanoes that make up the island of Ometepe in the great lake of Nicaragua where more than 40,000 inhabitants live. At the beginning of 2010, a scientific project was...
Within the last few years recent theoretical models have enabled better estimates of meteor-generated infrasounds, thus enabling enhanced descriptions of past events such as the Carancas and Chelyabinsk meteor falls. These models are often derived by employing weakly-nonlinear Whitham's approximations to Burgers equation. Even though it is known how to incorporate the effect of...
There are hundreds of mines and quarries within the Mongolia territories using blasts with varying yields and firing schemes. This mining-related explosion occupy a big part of the seismic catalogue issued by the IAG. To discriminate the earthquake and explosion is more difficult because the size and distances are different for all events. This study is designed to quantify Baganuur mining...
• Mobile Russian Installation for Noble Gas Analysis –Field (RINGA-F) has the productivity 20m3/h and Xe-133 MDC=0.35 mBq/m3. • Main process for sampling and processing of Xe and Kr from atmospheric air is cryogenic sorption on the charcoal. The turbo - expander used for cooling of the air. The minimum temperature -105 C was achieved after 6 hours, after 1.5 hours, T=-80 C. Extraction...
Radioactive argon-37 borns in significant quantities when the neutrons of nuclear explosion interacts with the environment elements, its lifetime is optimum for registration on the far distance and during the long period after the explosion. Thereof argon-37 is one of key informative radionuclides who can be "witnesses" of infringements of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT)....
• The model connecting results of measurement of Xe-131m, Xe-133m, Xe-133, and Xe-135 on noble gas system of ARIX type with a long cycle of sampling with average values of concentration activity of these radionuclides in atmospheric air is offered. The model considers: - probable changes of volumetric activity Xe radionuclides in atmospheric air during sampling; -Xe radionuclides decay in an...
DONET, i.e. the Dense Ocean-floor Network system for Earthquakes and Tsunamis is the first real-time seafloor observatory network monitoring earthquake and tsunami with high-accuracy, high-density, and large-scale in the seismogenic zone. It consists of various geophysical sensors such as seismometers and pressure sensors connected with submarine cable. DONET uses the state-of-the-art...
International geophysical year in 1957, very first seismic station from Russia was installed in Ulaanbaatar Mongolia and seismic monitoring started from this year. The Mongolia is situated in seismically active region, seismic activity of Mongolia is associated with the deformation included by the collision between India and Eurasia. Several strong earthquakes took places in Mongolia last...
Seismic events that have had a significant impact on the Colombian population (Sismo-Tsunami Tumaco 1979, M 7.9, Sismo Maizales 1979 M 7.9, Sismo Popayán 1983 M 5.5, Nevado del Ruiz Eruption 1985), along with other natural disasters, The Government Colombian government to assign to INGEOMINAS (now SGC) the functions of study and prevention of all types of geological risks in the Colombian...
Abstract The main part of this report is a list of nuclear explosions conducted by the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, India and Pakistan in 1945-98. The list includes all known nuclear test explosions and is compiled from a variety of sources including officially published informa- tion from the USA, Russia and France. The details given for each explosion...
The CTBTO aims to maximize the data availability and spectral quality from its radionuclide network. The radionuclide network consists of numerous stations of which many are in remote locations. In order to achieve the goal it is important to exploit possibilities to predict failures of the gamma detectors. The high resolution gamma detection requires reliable cooling and good cryostat vacuum....
Monitoring of geochemical groundwater parameters was carried out in twenty tubewells with depths ranging from 3 to103m located in and around the Cox’s Bazar paleobeach areas during the period of June 2012, June 2013 and May 2016. Results showed that radionuclides i.e., U and Th concentrations over the period of three years varied with fluctuation in pH and Eh. Concentrations of U...
In the South-West Indian Ocean, tropical cyclones occur from December to April. As they move over the ocean, cyclones generate strong swells that may represent large sources of microseismic noise(secondary peak at 0.1-0.35Hz) and infrasound noise(microbaroms at 0.2Hz). A dominant source of noise in the oceans is indeed generated by standing waves, issued from the interaction of two swells in...
Seismic ambient seismic noise cross-correlations are now being used to detect temporal (seasonal and prior to strong earthquake etcâ¦) variations of seismic velocity. The purpose of our work is to monitor velocity changes based on cross-correlation technique. Second purpose is to improve our seismic data quality. It is based on three years data archive of seismic real-time telemetered network...
Royal Science and Technology Park (RSTP) is in the process of constructing a Tier-3 National Data Center (NDC) for the country. RSTP National Data Center will be the brain of the establishment; it will accommodate computer systems and a number of mechanisms, such as telecommunications and storage structures. The processors and servers that will be hosted will run 24/7, with an up-time of...
The CTBTO runs a Capacity Building and Training (CBT) Programme focused on providing technical assistance to States Signatories to enable their effective participation in the CTBT verification regime.
One of the major Programme components is training NDC analysts to access and use IMS Data and IDC Products. The ultimate goal is to prepare NDCs to act as technical advisors to their respective...
The Great Cavern, Felsőpetény testing area, near Budapest, Hungary, had a great interest for On-Site Inspection (OSI) as an old nuclear explosion site. The area was subjected for near surface geophysical investigations in the form of microgravity and seismic investigations along two crossing profiles. The main objective of these observations in Felsőpetény area was to outline the subsurface...
The location of a seismic event using globally recorded P-wave signals presupposes that the signals have been correctly associated to each event in a multi-event environment. Incorrect association of signals is a major cause of mislocated events and of 'invalid’ event hypotheses comprising a mixture of signals from different real events. In this context negative evidence includes the...
The end of 2016 became a true political challenge for the arms control community. New US administration with its tough nuclear rhetoric seriously affected the widespread optimism about the potential momentum for the CTBT ratification by one of the most important Annex 2 States and the impetus for others to follow suit. Before November 2016 there was an actual prospect of catalysing the CTBT...
A network of 16 IMS radionuclide laboratories support analysis of samples from IMS radionuclide stations using high resolution, high purity germanium (HPGe) gamma ray spectrometry and/or coincidence system (for Noble gas). Thirteen of these 16 CTBT IMS particulate laboratories have been certified. Since 2001, as a part of the QA/QC program for the IMS Laboratories, the PTS organizes and...
For gamma radiation fields, current "gamma pictures" are created nowadays by commercially available "gamma cameras", using either segmented or pin-hole collimators, as well as Compton cameras, thus creating expensive, large and slow detectors, rather unsuitable to be used for verification of undeclared activities. A new concept of "gamma vision", based on a fully different concept of a...
In this study we apply a newly developed automatic detection and location method to a dataset compiled for the period of the IFE14 exercise in 2014 in Jordan. The aim is to compare results of the new techniques to outcomes of the exercise and to discriminate better between natural and artificial weak events in the Dead Sea basin. We complemented the IFE14 dataset by 5 permanent broad band, 8...
We present research, which has recently been undertaken, to develop metrics for a semi-automated program to estimate the depth of a very shallow seismic event (depth less than 2 km) in near-real time, by using the Complex Cepstrum algorithm. This sophisticated program has been shown to provide a unique method for identifying, and separating multiple events. This method is particularly suitable...
Usually, transducers implemented in infrasound sensor are mainly composed of two associated elements. The first one converts the external pressure variation into a physical linear displacement. The second one converts this motion into an electrical signal. According to this configuration, MB3, MB2000 and MB2005 microbarometers are using an aneroid capsule for the first one, and an...
40 out of the 80 radionuclide stations of the International Monitoring System of the CTBTO will be equipped with Noble Gas detection systems. Today 31 of these stations are already installed and 25 certified. Noble Gas detection system technology for the CTBT verification founded its basis with the International Noble Gas Experiment (INGE) more than 15 years ago with the contribution in...
The advanced implementation of the multi-phase model, which uses radioactive material as a contaminant, and the evaluation of parameter values are discussed in the work. A semi-analytical solution of the simulation of the contaminant transport dynamics in the lake water and one-dimensional sediment solute transport including non-equilibrium processes is presented. The model includes a concept...
Characterization of seismic events is an important component of the CTBT verification regime. Non-linear machine learning techniques are capable of compactly modeling complex datasets by using a local similarity metric. This process results in a low-dimensional representation of the dataset, in which each data item is characterized by a small number of intrinsic parameters. In this work, we...
This abstract is meant to study the North Korea's nuclear tests that were conducted in January and October 2016. North Korea set off two explosions at the test site in the northeast of the country. Later, it was discovered that these two explosions were nuclear and nuclear device were used in them. The comparison of the two tests result, obtained from Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty...
Due to peculiarities of radionuclides dispersion in the atmosphere the fallout, especially if radionuclides are not emitted into the stratosphere through an obvious atmospheric nuclear test conducted, creates a significant inhomogeneous pattern while air mass travel-path models show definite backward trajectories pointed out to the possible emission source. In order to understand nuclear...
During 1976-1987 in the territory of the Eastern Siberia (the Siberian platform, Chitinskaya area and Yakutia) ten peaceful nuclear explosions (PNE) have been produced. PNE’s magnitudes vary within 4.8-5.3. Explosions were registered by regional analog seismic station network located in the Baikal rift system (FDSN code is BY) at the epicentral distances from 246 to 1407 km. The regional...
France conducted atmospheric and underground nuclear weapons tests on and around the atoll of Moruroa and Fangataufa in the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1996. The poster outlines a project for raising public awareness on the history and impact of these 193 tests through the establishment of an alternative commission of inquiry. It explores the legacy of the nuclear...
Archiving, retrieval and digitization of the historical seismographic data from nuclear test monitoring is an inevitable step before the data can be further investigated. Since the very first nuclear weapon test in 1945, several nuclear explosions took place around the world during the 20th century. It is a naturally arising task to investigate the corresponding seismic recordings obtained by...
The M 7.8 Southwest of Sumatra earthquake occurred in Indian ocean was around 682 km from Mentawai Island. The USGS reported the earthquake occurred at 12:49 UTC, 4.908°S – 94.275°E, with a depth of 24 km. The earthquake felt by people in Padang city and surroundings area. This intraplate earthquake had a strike-slip faulting mechanism and generate the small tsunami. To investigate tsunami in...
In the years 1912 and 1917, during the first world war two explosions took place in the eastern part of Austria in an ammunition depot. Observations of infrasound signals were made in the close vicinity of the depots as well at distances between 250 to 300 km. Old documents and reports describing both incidents are kept in the archive of the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geophysik...
Observations are made of signals with frequency peaks around 105 to110 Hz in the spectra of the Diego Garcia IMS hydroacoustic monitoring station. The data were acquired on 1st January 2003 at two hydrophone triads that belong to CTBTO's IMS hydroacoustic network. These are situated at North-West (H08N) and South-East (H08S) of the Diego Garcia atoll in the Indian Ocean. The IMS hydroacoustic...
For the purpose of a long-term self-noise study of the STS-2 seismometer, four co-aligned sensors were deployed side by side at the Conrad Observatory (Austria) over a four year time span. The analysis of the recorded data shows that self-noise estimates computed using the standard three-sensor coherency method strongly depend on accurate sensor alignment, and that for vertical components...
Primary and auxiliary seismic stations of the International Monitoring System detected seismic signals from five declared underground tests conducted by the DPRK. These data allow thorough quantitative comparison aimed at understanding of the similarities and differences in seismic wave generation by underground explosions. In routine automatic and interactive processing, the International...
Sampling of subsurface soil gases represents one of the main On Site Inspection (OSI) activities for the verification of the Treaty. According to the scenario in which the OSI has been launched, the search logic framework could give to this activity an high priority. Generally, gas compositions are entirely different in air and deep-crust derived components and the usually higher concentration...
One key parameter when IMS facilities of CTBTO detect radionuclides is the time origin of release. The activities of different isotopes reported in IMS measurements are usable for event time calculation. In theory, event dating works well under the assumption of a nuclear explosion scenario. For the radioxenon isotopes, the operational challenge is to understand results of event dating applied...
The IMS (International Monitoring System) is a global network of monitoring facilities using different technologies: waveform (seismic, hydroacoustic and infrasound) and radionuclide (particulate and noble gas). It is designed to detect the waveform produced by nuclear test explosions and the subsequently released radioactive radionuclides. IMS stations transmit their data to the IDC...
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developed an easy to use software interface for the PTS to use with NaI-based survey instruments that also use the Ortec Digibase. Our interface, now operating on two US-loaned 4-L NaI systems with integrated GPS, enables both the rapid detection of radiation anomalies as well as determination of the relative direction of the source. Combined with GPS...
The methods make it possible to get most credible results of the source parameters determination as they are based on the calculation of probability maximum for recorded signal parameters using data bank that contains signal and source parameters and their model theoretical dependence. Theoretical model parameters are optimized on the same principle of maximum credibility of the available data...
The monitoring of atmospheric plumes using a network of sensors is complicated by many constraints such as interfering plumes, and sensor placement, cost and performance. The presence of interfering plumes can confound efforts to discriminate a specific source, while network optimization is rarely independent of cost or placement constraints. The use of Bayesian methods and Genetic Algorithms...
In the context of CTBT verification, isotopic ratios of xenon are used to distinguish civilian sources of radioactivity from nuclear test events using a threshold value that separates the reactor and nuclear test domains. Two methods exist to calculate the confidence range of the ratios: Bayesian decision method, and Fieller’s Theorem. The purpose of this project is to select the best method...
One main effort in the OSI laboratory field activity is to ensure a high throughput of gamma spectrometry analysis of the samples. Most of the typical analysed samples, such as soils, are supposed to be within environmental range of activity and it is very important to screening out any anomaly in the gamma spectra of the samples. A multisample holder, with two separate layers, has been...
In this study we present preliminary results on the structure of the crust and upper mantle in Transbaikalia. The research area lies within the Baikal Rift Zone. We present research based on data collected by seismic stations of the Selenginskaya local network during 2-5 years. We use the receiver function (RF) technique in the LQT ray-oriented coordinate system (Vinnik, 1977). The seismic...
Beta-gamma coincidence monitoring systems are one of the technologies of the noble gas component of the International Monitoring System (IMS). The coincidence spectra are analysed at the International Data Centre (IDC) using the so called net count calculation method (NCC) based on a number of Regions of Interest (ROI) in the coincidence spectrum. In order to enhance the reliability of...
The International Data Centre (IDC) of the CTBTO is developing a capability to do high-resolution atmospheric transport modelling (HRATM) using Flexpart-WRF. Compared to conventional atmospheric transport modelling, HRATM is folding the available meteorological data in coarse resolution with a static, high-resolution topography of the Earth to create new meteorological data with a resolution...
We present two year results obtained from the integrated multiparameter borehole system at Marsite. The very broad band (VBB) system have been operating since installation in November 2014; one year in a water filled borehole and one year in a dry Borehole. from January 2016. The real time data has been available to the community. The two Borehole environments are compared showing the superior...
In Ukraine for on-field monitoring of the radionuclides uses the Radiometric and spectrometric instrument PRS–01 which is created according to IAEA recommendations stated in the IAEA TECDOC-1312, (2002) "Detection of Radioactive Material at Borders", and UNECE document "Recommendations on Monitoring and Response Procedures for Radioactive Scrap Metal". Modern rules of ecological and radiation...
Choosing detection sensitivities or data quality objectives (DQO) for on-site inspections (OSI) requires selecting a threshold that must be met or exceeded during in-field analysis. However, this threshold may be difficult to meet in every scenario. A modeling utility built using the GEANT4 C++ framework has been developed to simulate acquired gamma spectra from any user- defined source. Using...
The radioxenon background in the atmosphere is dominated by civilian sources, most noticeably from the production of 99Mo from fission of uranium. Radioxenon from these sources are detected every day in the International Monitoring System (IMS). In an effort to minimize the impact of these radioxenon emissions on the IMS, the STAX project has been conceived to measure the emissions at the...
Results of the study of groundwater in areas of underground nuclear explosions (UNE) on Semipalatinsk test site (STS) have shown that the presence of high concentrations of 137Cs and 90Sr (hundreds of Bq/kg), which can be found only near the venue of the UNE. At a distance from the epicenter of the explosion up to 200 m radionuclide concentration is reduced to a fraction of Bq/kg. At the same...
The National Data Center (NDC) in Iraq is established at the Iraq National Monitoring Authority to promote nonproliferation. The center is mandated to collect seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound (SHI) and radionuclide data to monitor test explosions. In addition, the Iraqi NDC use data it receives from the International Data Center (IDC) and the International Monitoring System (IMS) to promote...
The Palindaba Treaty which aims to create a nuclear weapon free zone (NWFZ) in Africa entered into force, since july 2009. The African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE) was established for the purpose of ensuring compliance with the obligations under the Treaty consisting for the Parties to do not conduct, among others, research and development in nuclear explosions and other allied...
As the world faces a challenging future in maintaining the commercial availability of radioactive isotopes for medical use, new methods of medical isotope production are being pursued. Many of these are small in size and could effectively operate continuously. With the potential for much shorter retention times, a new suite of isotopes may soon be found in the environment. An effort to...
During underground nuclear explosion (UNE) significant rocks volume turns gaseous forming UNE cavity. The most part of "warfare" borehole (WB) has no signs of day surface disturbance, and remains to our time in quasi-stable state. At the same time in a number of epicentral areas of WB the failing is observed, formed at different times - a part during UNE, others – much later. The presence of...
Local earthquake coda wave decay parameter, called Q coda, studying is a worldwide motivation. Geometrical spreading, scattering attenuation due to heterogeneities and intrinsic absorption due to inelastic properties of the media are some reasons to decay of wave amplitude or energy during its propagation. Numerous papers have been published reporting changes in coda Q associated with the...
In the late 90s, using waveforms from IMS seismic stations, we showed that cross-validated, empirical amplitude corrections reduce scatter in the high frequency P/S ratios used for event discrimination. Since then, we have explored ways to model local and regional phase amplitudes, and codas, using tomography methods that solve for attenuation, source and site terms. Such models will be...
During December 2016, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty Organization (CTBTO) re-established the hydro-acoustic station HA04 close to the Crozet Islands in the Indian Ocean as part of the International Monitoring System’s (IMS) world-wide, multi-technology sensor network. The station is composed of two triads of hydrophones located to the north and south of Possession Island. High...
Natural radionuclides essentially a lot of in the environment and along with the use of nuclear technology in various fields would increase the concentration of radionuclides in nature that can causing environmental contamination and it is necessary for monitoring radionuclides in the environment. radionuclides particulate monitoring in Indonesia is aimed determining the ambient concentrations...
In 2016, a study on the design of the next generation cabled hydroacoustic stations was conducted with the objective of evaluating viable architectures for the sensor package of the underwater system. The goals of this project were to: i) improve sustainability by reducing the impact of events that may negatively affect data availability, ii) facilitate reparability through modular designs and...
In the late September 2016, within a collaboration project between National Institute for Earth Physics (NIEP) and Provisional Technical Secretariat (PTS) of the CTBTO, a PTS infrasound portable array (I67RO) has been deployed in Romania (in Cluj County), for one year. PTS assisted NIEP with deployment and with initial training of Romanian staff involved in the operation, maintenance and data...
The surveillance system of the CTBTO remains today, the most powerful and the most imposing surveillance system in the world. It offers opportunities for research in many fields (aviation, health, studies of certain marine features, studies and prevention of volcanoes .......) The member countries of the CTBTO, in their desire to accompany the organization for the success of its mission,...
ABSTRACT The National Data Centres (NDCs) are technical organisations that play an important role in providing support to the CTBTO Member States. NDCs accomplish this by advising the CTBTO Member States on verification of the CTBT through the sharing of data and products received from the International Data Centre (IDC) as well as analysis of data received from the International Monitoring...
All radionuclide stations are equipped with meteorological sensors and transmit these data to the IDC. These data help to interpret radionuclide measurements, especially with respect to local influences. Data from selected stations are transmitted rea- time to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Meteorological measurements not being the primary mission of the IMS, their quality is not...
The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (RIS) Data Management Center has developed and currently operates the Modular Utility for Statistical Knowledge Gathering (MUSTANG) system. IRIS receives data from approximately 3500 stations in real time and has roughly 30,000 stations covering 5 decades in its holdings. MUSTANG has analyzed all Broadband, High Broadband, and Long period...
Argentina started the construction of a new 30 MW research reactor (RA-10), located at the Ezeiza Atomic Center (CAE), 40 km from Buenos Aires city. The RA-10 is conceived as a multipurpose facility suitable for radioisotopes production, materials and fuel irradiation, neutron techniques applications and silicon doping. The operation cycle is a 26 continuous days. The design is based on low...
Kyrgyzstan was a country producing uranium ore in the USSR from 1940 to 1970. There were remained the huge amount of uranium waste in the country. Many tailings and uranium wastes were located in seismically hazardous mountainous areas along the mountains, rivers, populated areas and areas at risk of landslides. The radiological impact on the environment and the population was not fully known...
Argentina was the first country in the world to change the Molybdenum 99 production process from HEU (high enrichment Uranium) to LEU (low enrichment Uranium) bearing in mind commitment towards the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and world initiatives for stricter control of nuclear material. In 1985 the Radioisotope Production Plant from Fission (PPRF) began to produce...
The monitoring capabilities of the IMS noble gas systems may benefit from reductions of radioactive noble gas emissions. If these are achieved at nuclear facilities that have high radioxenon releases in normal operation, this could significantly enhance the CTBT verification capability. In this framework, the SCK•CEN was contracted by the CTBTO under EU Council Decision V to design a mobile...
The process of performing RASA high purity germanium (HPGe) detector calibrations in field systems is a labor-intensive and error-prone task. Mistakes and delays in this process commonly result in additional downtime of RASA systems after a detector replacement. At present, human intervention is required for input of detector certificate data, monitoring acquisitions for the appropriate stop...
The principle of discrimination between xenon from civil reactor sourcesand xenon released from a nuclear explosion by analysing xenon isotopic ratios is well established. Xenon isotopic ratios similar to those from explosive sources are of particular relevance for CTBT monitoring. This study investigated which parameters influence the isotopic composition of radioactive xenon in nuclear power...
Real time monitoring systems around seismogenic zone are very important for early detection of earthquake and Tsunamis. Furthermore, these system are also indispensable to understand crustal activities and phenomena as precursor. In Japan, Ocean floor network systems as DONET and S-NET already deployed for early warning and prediction researches. In DONET system, DONET1 and DONET2 are focusing...
Real time monitoring systems around seismogenic zone are very important for early detection of earthquake and Tsunamis. Furthermore, these system are also indispensable to understand crustal activities and phenomena as precursor. In Japan, Ocean floor network systems as DONET and S-NET already deployed for early warning and prediction researches. In DONET system, DONET1 and DONET2 are focusing...
On 6th august 1945, when the B29 Enola Gay took off from Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands to drop nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, it changed the balance of power of the international system, which divided the world into two: nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states, thereby altering the discourse of the conventional idea of security. In this course of series, worst victim became...
The Regional Seismic Travel Time (RSTT) model reduces travel time prediction errors for phases (Pn, Pg, Sn, and Lg) which are commonly used for seismic event location. Reduction of travel time prediction errors leads directly to reduction of epicenter location errors, and accurate event location is critical to Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) verification. The Provisional Technical...
Both events in 2016 from DPRK test site were confidently registered by all national stations including primary IMS station PS45. The information about event was processed very quick and forwarded to superior authorities. To identification of the seismic signal from DPRK the cross-correlation analysis between the first arrivals of registered seismic signal and a previously registered signal...
According to the calculation，The latest nuclear explosion occurred in North Korea had the largest energy at the frequency of 0.1-3 Hz, and in the frequency higher than 3 Hz, the latest event had the same energy with the ones in Jan. 2016、the one in 2013 and even the one in 2009. At 2 Hz, the ratio of the event occurred on Sep. in 2016 to other four events are 40.1、4.7、2.0、1.8 respectively,...
In April, 2016, CTBTO came to Zambia to configure and install the Capacity Building System at our National Data centre (NDC) office. The National Data Centre was commissioned in February 2006, inZambian. With this new Capacity Building system that comes with some analysis programs, it has made our work much easier in analysis, getting data from other surrounding Countries and come up with a...
The North East of Egypt is considered the most active seismotectonic region in Egypt, having geologically and seimotectonically complicated structures with moderate seismic activity. The seismic activity was not located properly due to the lack of observations. Even with re-picking all earthquakes above 2.5 and increasing the total number of phases involved in location by (24.1%), using only...
Radar data from remote sensing satellites is being used as additional mean for the verification of underground nuclear explosions. The Differential Interferometry Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) analysis provide the evidence of a non-recurring surface displacement of up to 10 cm after the January 2016 explosion about 3 km northwest of the tunnel entrance at the North Korean test site. This...
The chief objective of this essay is to raise awareness towards the Treaty’s rapid entry into force in the group of lawmakers or members of the parliament(s) at the national level. Just by knowing the full form of the CTBT does not make any sense. The vision of CTBT is too deep as well as highly important and it must be resonate in hearts. In this capacity, political leaders can extend the...
Thousands of Radiation Portal Monitors (RPM) are deployed worldwide by various government agencies. They are installed at nuclear facilities, border crossings, airports, seaports, scrap metal processing facilities, etc. The most common implementation includes the use of a primary detection and secondary inspection. The first stage is designed to determine the presence of radiation, while the...
The waveforms of 50t explosion occurred on Dec. 11, in 2007 and the nuclear explosion occurred on Oct. 9, in 2006 recorded by HIA (belong to Global Seismic Network) and PS12 (belong to International Monitoring System) had been analyzed. The distances between the two events to HIA and PS12 are over 1000km, and the distance between HIA and PS12 is about 30km, the PS12 is farer than HIA. Analyst...
Besides aftershock monitoring, resonance seismometry is listed in the CTBT as passive seismological method for On Site Inspection (OSI). The objective is nuclear verification through detection of resonances, static structural anomalies and monitoring of temporal changes of subsurface properties caused by an underground nuclear explosion (UNE). During an expert meeting in November 2015 at the...
The Kathmandu Valley was strongly rocked at 11:56 local time by an Mw 7.8 earthquake on 25th of April 2015. This earthquake was followed by a large number of aftershocks including the 12th May 2015 (Mw 7.3) Dolakha Earthquake. So far, the Mw 7.8 earthquake sequence has claimed more than 8500 lives and have made a large population homeless. The largest peak ground acceleration (PGA) was...
The monitoring capabilities of the IMS noble gas systems may benefit from reductions of radioactive noble gas emissions. If these are achieved at nuclear facilities that have high radioxenon releases in normal operation, this could significantly enhance the CTBT verification capability. In this framework, the SCK•CEN was contracted by the CTBTO under the EU Council Decision V to design a...
Yield estimation of explosions using seismic ways is always a difficult problem in seismology. There are many factors that can affect the result of yield estimation such as source characteristics, depth of burial, propagation path, attenuation, variation of the crustal structure and so on. Accurate yield estimation need a suitable relationship which is always empirical and must solve the...
At the end of March 1999 work on the OSI Concept of Operations was transitioned to work on the OSI Operational Manual. The Concept of Operations document was compiled in CTBT/PTS/INF.136, "Compilation of Work on the Draft Concept of Operations for a CTBT OSI." The ideas expressed in the Concept of Operations have continued to guide the PTS OSI Program and Operational Manual. IFE14 successfully...
L 3 MariPro manages program risk using a structured and formalized process. The purpose of this Poster is to describe the risk management highlights used throughout the design, build, and install of HA04 at the Crozet Islands. The Poster will summarize the defined roles and responsibilities, required activities, unique processes and review requirements. The Risk management process described...
The objective of the paper is to examine the role of scientific community in promoting the CTBT. The crucial role scientists played as public intellectuals, policy influencers, and community leaders in shifting nuclear weapons policies and helping to build the international nuclear nonproliferation regime––including CTBT––remains understudied in policy scholarship. The CTBT’s historical...
Five nuclear tests (in 2006, 2009, 2013 and two in 2016) have been conducted by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The explosions were detected by International Monitoring System (IMS) and located at International Data Centre (IDC), event magnitude estimates (mb from 4.1 to 5.1) indicating the increasing of energy chronologically released. Seismic signals generated by the DPRK...
The SALSA3D global 3D velocity model of the Earth’s mantle has been developed to improve the accuracy and precision of seismic travel time predictions for a wide suite of regional and teleseismic phases. Improved travel time predictions lead directly to significant improvements in the accuracy and precision of seismic event locations as compared to locations computed using standard 1D velocity...
The responsibility for SAMS software development has been switched from the Institute for Geophysics, University of Stuttgart, Germany to the software developing company Sonicona, Tübingen, Germany. In the contractual context Sonicona will develop and implement new features and enhancements to the present SAMS software version. The key features include improvements of the data management and...
To achieve the design requirements for the SAUNA III radio-xenon measurement system a new beta detector cell has been developed. The new detector was designed to handle the considerably larger sample size and the change in carrier gas from helium to nitrogen, with maintained or improved detector sensitivity and energy resolution. The first detectors of the new design have been produced and...
Though the CTBTO verification regime is not equipped and designed to solve many the issue that accompanied in International Treaties and Sustainable Development Goals of UN, the CTBTO centralized approach confirmed the necessity of similar framework to address the global issues, preferably adding and building required tools around the CTBTO system while maintaining its authentic core function,...
Scientist across the world played a significant role in nuclear arms control;for example, developing the technologies to detect illicit underground testing of weapons. The scientific community must now collaborate, communicate among themselves to develop the technology to support disarmament. Institutions, or in other words an ordered platform is necessary to initiate the process. A formal...
Gamma-radiation survey is an essential component of an on-site inspection under the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT - 69.c). The Silicon photomultiplier-based Compton Telescope for Safety and Security (SCoTSS) provides mobile-survey isotope detection, alarming and identification, as well as concentration and dose-rate measurements for contour mapping. In addition, SCoTSS can...
Global maps of atmospheric Xe-133 from simulations of the atmospheric dispersion of industrial releases (radiopharmaceutical facilities and nuclear power plants) have revealed a large spatial variability. On annual average, simulated activity concentrations near the surface vary from 0.01 mBq/m3 to more than 5 mBq/m3. At most stations of the International Monitoring Network (IMS) of the...
To test the ability of new classes of ship to withstand explosions, the United States Navy periodically detonates underwater 10000lb chemical explosions close to the hull of the vessel undergoing testing. In terms of monitoring compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, as some ground-truth information exists, these explosions provide an opportunity to assess the capability of...
Waveform correlation is a very useful technique for identifying repeating seismicity. In this investigation, we seek to determine the ability of waveform correlation to reconstruct a seismic event bulletin for a global, sparse network. Using about 10 years of data from the International Monitoring System (IMS) primary stations, we constructed a template library based on about 2.6 million...
Modern seismic hazard assessment is one of the major concepts for sustainable development of the Caucasus region in general. Safety of the civilian population in the region as well as safe implementation of large economic projects must be protected. Prosperity in the Caucasus region, and its successful development, unconditionally depends on international projects aiming to integrate the...
Al-Aluja is one of the important Palestinian towns. The spatial distribution of the natural periods over a map is presented. It shows the important characteristics of soil deposit that will effect significantly the mitigation of the seismic risk impacts. The microtremors are very important and useful measurements in site response which could compensate the shortage and deficiency of the...
Kyrgyzstan has signed the CTBT in 1996, and in 2003 it had been ratified by the Kyrgyz Parliament. In 2002 on the basis of Data Center of the Institute of seismology of National Academy of sciences of Kyrgyz Republic the National Data Center NDC-093 was established. Creation of the NDC-KG with access to the IDC in Vienna opens for Kyrgyzstan the additional capabilities in solving both...
In September 03, 2015, anew earthquake with magnitude MB = 4.5 was occurred in a completely silent area located at 40 km south El Alamein city, north western desert, where there are some 20 million pieces of unexploded ordnance. This study aims to review the widespread seismicity over interval periods of seismic monitoring of Egypt and argue El Alamein event as a new active source. Seismic...
The new computational technology for weak seismic activity monitoring has been developed based on the data of local networks and seismic data processing. The coordinates of the epicenters and six independent components of the seismic moment tensor equivalent sources were determined. The components of the seismic moment tensor depend on the time. This allows us to do a complete analysis of...
As part of capacity building and joint research under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Seismic Cooperation Program (SCP), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) collaboratively installed 9-element seismic arrays QWAR (Saudi Arabia, 2012) and HOQAR (Oman, 2015). All elements are equipped with 3-component short-period sensors. HOQAR array data is received in real-time at the Earthquake...
Abstract This study is aimed to determine the local site effect by means of the horizontal-to-vertical (H/V) spectral ratios. The Nakamura's concept (Nakamura Y. 1989) is applied in JERASH city in order to determine the resonance frequencies and amplification factors for, finding the dynamic characteristics for structural engineering purposes. Results obtained in this study show that; dominant...
The National Seismological Network of Colombia operated by Colombian Geological Survey receive in real time seismic data from 48 broad band stations and 47 strong motion stations installed along the Colombian territory and data from stations of neighbor countries. This high density of the data allows to retrieve source parameters of moderate earthquakes. Moment tensor solutions from...
Most models of seismic structure of the West African craton come from global-scale studies. With a higher-resolution regional velocity model, we could locate seismic events and calculate regional Green's functions more accurately, thereby improving discrimination between natural earthquakes and man-made events. We aim to produce a 3D regional shear wave velocity model for West Africa, using...
For the routine procedure to determine the hypocenter of recorded seismic events, explosion and nuclear events, specified crustal 1D seismic velocity models (used in Albania) have been derived and improved over the years. These used 1D velocity models are derived in 1986 (Kociaj S), 1992 (Peci et al), 2001 (Muco et al) years and the new model was developed in 2011 (Ormeni Rr). Comparing of...
The Baikal rift system is undergoing an active tectonic deformation expressed by a high level of seismic activity. This deformation leads to physical and mechanical changes of crustal properties which can be investigated by the seismic quality factor and its frequency dependence. Using a single backscattering model, a seismic quality-factor (QC), a frequency parameter (n) and an attenuation...
The regions of 3 research reactors location in Kazakhstan (VVR-K, IGR, IVG-1) were investigated as well as the suggested site for construction of low-enriched uranium bank to develop methodical issues for successful estimation of seismic conditions of places for designed, constructed and exploited facilities of atomic field and atomic industry. To characterize seismic activity of the earth...
Earthquake data collected from regional and international seismological stations was compiled in order to produce a seismicity map for the Sudan and South Sudan. The seismicity and tectonic information were used to identify the relationship between the distribution of earthquakes and active geological structures and to create seismic source zones. The results showed that the study area lies...
An earthquake catalogue spanning more than six decades of instrumental observations has been assembled for Botswana and adjacent regions. Whilst the level of local seismicity in Botswana is generally low, moderate to large earthquakes have been recorded in the Okavango delta region (ODR), the largest event of which was observed on 1952 and had a local magnitude of 6.7. The motivation in...
According to the map of general seismic zoning of the Republic of Kazakhstan (2006) the territory of the Semipalatinsk Test Site is considered as aseismic. Starting from 1950 analogue seismograms of earthquakes were collected, source parameters were précised. Contemporary instrumental seismic data of Kazakhstan monitoring network from 1994, and data from temporary networks of seismic stations...
Seismoacoustic effects of the Khubsugul earthquake of December 5, 2014 (51.37N, 100.63E, MW=4.9) were studied. Earthquake occurred in the Khubsugul basin at the depth 3 km. Acoustic signal was registered by the infrasound station "Tory" located at the distance 175 km from the epicenter. Travel time of acoustic waves is about 280 s. Apparent velocity of infrasound signal propagation is ~625...
The National Data Centre Preparedness Exercises (NPE) are regularly performed dealing with fictitious treaty violations to practice the combined analysis of CTBT verification technologies and national technical means. These exercises should help to evaluate the effectiveness of analysis procedures applied at NDCs and the quality, completeness and usefulness of IDC products. The NPE2015 is a...
The south Sudan earthquake of May 20, 1990 is so far among the three strongest (Mw ≥ 7.0) earthquakes to occur in the eastern part of Africa since 1910 and was accompanied by two aftershocks on May 24, 1990 (Mw = 6.5 and 7.1). Results of teleseismic body-waves inversion show that the best solution for the May 20, 1990 south Sudan earthquake consists of only one event on a fault having strike,...
Boğazici University - Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute (KOERI) acts as the Turkish National Data Center (NDC) and is operating International Monitoring System (IMS) Primary Seismic Station BRTR (PS-43) under Belbasi Nuclear Tests Monitoring Center (Belbasi NTMC) for the verification of compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty since February 2000. The NDC...
At the location of explosive nuclear boreholes at Semipalatinsk Test Site area an active seismic investigations have been conducted along 8 parallel profiles with 6 km length and distance of 500 m between them. During these works 3-component signal registration was carried out, which allowed us to make analyses of the P- and S-waves first arrivals. Using forward ray tracing method, velocity...
Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances (TIDs) can be observed following surface or underground nuclear weapons tests. The availability of large, dense networks of GNSS receivers enables the detection of these disturbances and mapping of their speed and direction of propagation over large geographical areas. Our previously published results have shown the detection of disturbances from the 2006 and...
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has developed a software platform to analyze the radioxenon and particulate radionuclide datasets from the International Monitoring System (IMS). This development platform, called Watchmen, allows the testing of software modules to provide additional analysis methods and to combine the radionuclide data sets for more complete evaluation. PNNL...
Worldwide monitoring of noble gases is an essential part of the verification system of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty as it can provide a direct evidence of the nuclear nature of an underground or underwater explosion. The detection capability of the noble gas network is weakened due to the presence of a worldwide civilian radioxenon background. Improving the understanding of...
Seismic waves attenuate while propagating through the earth from the source to any target site or recording station. Density and the geometry of each seismic network has the main role on the recording and then evaluating the parameters of an earthquake. CTBTO by its responsibility has a key role to make a safe world where it can thereat by nuclear weapons. Monitoring all probable nuclear tests...
A study of regional and local attenuation of earthquake seismic waves could contribute to the prediction of earthquake ground motion which contributes to the verification system by improving signal interpretation. Here we present the results of a PhD thesis. In this study, we have applied the Multiple Lapse Time Window Analysis (MLTWA) method to the local earthquake data from BRTR (PS-43) and...
A low weight, portable High Purity Germanium detector, n-type, 55% efficiency has been tested and characterised for the purpose to evaluate its use in an OSI field laboratory. This detector has been proved reliable and robust in field conditions but some further tests need to be performed in order to assess its reliability and efficiency in a laboratory like configuration. One main aspect to...
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) established a global monitoring system for atmospheric xenon radioactivity as part of the International Monitoring System (IMS).
During the International Noble Gas Experiment (INGE), a significant correlation between radio-xenon background and geographical region was observed. Investigations on the radio-xenon background have highlighted that...
Gas dynamics in the shallow underground environment are a critical component dictating how delayed noble gas indicators of underground nuclear explosions eventually arrive at the surface. Understanding how these gases behave in response to rapid pressure changes, how natural gas backgrounds evolve, and the nature of the atmosphere-surface interface are essential to optimizing monitoring and...
Abstract In this study we determined the local site effect by means of the horizontal-to-vertical (H/V) spectral ratios. The Nakamura's concept (Nakamura Y. 1989) is applied in JERASH city in order to determine the resonance frequencies and amplification factors for, finding the dynamic characteristics for structural engineering purposes. Results obtained in this study shows that; dominant...
A Joint Task Force sponsored by three UN agencies—International Telecommunication Union, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO—is leading an effort for integrating environmental monitoring sensors into transoceanic commercial submarine telecommunication cables, extending their capabilities beyond transoceanic telemetry. These are...
Multispectral imaging techniques have been tested in OSI related CTBTO activities. The Treaty permits the use of hand-held multispectral cameras during OSI ground inspections. Spectral scanners have successfully mastered several applications over broad spectral ranges; however hand-held scanning has its limitations in mobility and flexibility. To overcome these limitations, snapshot imaging or...
Three-component seismic station «Ala-Archa» (AAK) was installed in Kyrgyzstan in May, 1983. Location of this one in specially constructed granite tunnel away from the seismic noise sources has made the station an effective site for monitoring both regional, teleseismic events, and nuclear explosions. In October 1990, a digital broadband network station IRIS / IDA AAK was opened here, which was...
The modern seismological monitoring system in the Republic of Belarus provides continuous round-the-clock observations and recording both natural and man-made seismic events in a wide energy and distance range, real-time data transmission, processing and analysis, as well as the seismic conditions assessment. It comprises 2 broadband seismic stations and 2 local Soligorsk (8 observation...
The infrasound data from atmospheric storms obtained at the I43 IMS station were analyzed. The corresponding data of infrasound and internal gravity waves at the group of microbarographs in Moscow region were analyzed. The infrasound at a frequency of about 0.3 Hz from convective storms during August 12, 2016 was observed. The corresponding results of recording internal gravity waves from...
Radioactive isotopes of the noble gases xenon and argon are the "smoking gun" of an underground nuclear explosion in that detection of these isotopes is nearly unequivocal proof that a nuclear explosion occurred, especially if they are detected in the predicted ratios. Traditionally in the context of large-scale environmental transport, such as in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, the...
Between October 2006 and September 2016, 5 declared underground nuclear explosions carried out at the Punggye-ri test-site in North Korea were detected both at regional and teleseismic distances. Double-difference relative location estimates are quite network-sensitive with inter-event distance estimates from regional Pn phases consistently longer than estimates from teleseismic P-phases. The...
The source estimation of man-made radionuclides by using inverse modeling of atmospheric motion plays a vital role in CTBTO's activities. This work studies the effect of the atmospheric modeling uncertainties on source estimation through a synthetic numerical experiment, which consists of four types of modeling (Eulerian meso-scale atmospheric modeling, forward atmospheric transport modeling...
The 2015 Phalla earthquake occurred near Islamabad, Pakistan with strong shaking but no damage report. We estimated the focal parameters and slip model of this earthquake by waveform modeling of the local data using moment tensor inversion. We analysis 25 station waveform data retrieved from MSSP (Micro seismic studies Programme). We found strike slip mechanism within thrusting tectonic...
Abstract The RN40 is located on the Southern shore of the Kuwaiti Bay. The station maintains a data sharing relationship with the International Data Center (IDC). It upholds its own share of the bargain, by gathering data on radionuclides and its correlates, and as well, sharing this data with the IDC. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), alongside its function of gathering data,...
CEA developed for many years systems that enable to detect radioactive noble gas from civilian and military nuclear activities. It leads to the patent (1999) and the industrialization (beginning of 2000’s) of the « Système de Prélèvement d’Air et de détection en Ligne Automatique des radioXénons atmosphériques » (SPALAX). After several intermediate improvements especially regarding ovens,...
In order to obtain the differences of characteristics of the noise field between the seismic arrays along the coast and the seismic arrays in the mainland, we use the data from Fuqing array and LZDM array in this research. Cross-correlation method was used in this research to tell us the truth that the noise cross-correlation between site pairs along the coast present a linear relation with...
The International Monitoring System (IMS) of the CTBTO comprises 80 radionuclide monitoring stations worldwide, of which 40 will be capable of measuring radioxenon. Radioxenon monitoring is a key component of the IMS as it provides forensic evidence of underground nuclear explosions. Radioxenon may however be emitted by civilian nuclear facilities, such as medical isotope production...
The new Air Effluent Monitor (AEM) that INVAP has developed for nuclear facilities stacks, with the combination of a NaI scintillator and a CdTe semiconductor detector, has been assembled, started-up at factory, and will be installed in a new facility in the next months. Calibration of the monitor has been performed with tailored radioactive sources, to cover the needs of the detection of...
Operations and Maintenance of the facilities at International Monitoring System (IMS) is performed by the Station Operators with the required support at the Provisional Technical Secretariat. This is the sustainment strategy and it requires continuous knowledge of the facilities; the installed equipment and its configuration, the conditions at the sites and operating procedures. The IMS...
The IAEA’s Division of Information Management regularly uses geographic information for assessment of correctness and completeness of States’ declarations, which is essential to soundly draw safeguards conclusions. The data model guidelines (1) for providing information set forth in the Model Additional Protocol (AP) may also provide for other verification regimes with a proven, real-world...
The goal of this research is to determine earthquake hypocenters and focal mechanism solutions accurately, hence obtain recent states of stresses in the Marmara Region. Accordingly, this research aims to define branches of fault structures and their geometrical orientations. In this study, six clusters of earthquakes are located. Next, they are submitted to the stress tensor inversion...
The analysis of seismic data for test-ban verification relies on the detection of and discrimination between underground nuclear explosions and natural earthquakes. Data with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is needed to make measurements of such seismic discriminants as source depth and mb/Ms. Seismic arrays can be used to improve the SNR of waveform data for a suspicious event using various...
The Egyptian Seismological Network has more than 75 seismic stations distributed all over the country. The analysis of NRIAG bulletin could identify 15769 artificial seismic events recorded in the period from 1997 to 2015. The spatial distribution of events is used to identify localities where there may be explosion contamination. We present a statistics and mapping to identify mining and...
A fairly good estimate of net global (or regional) release of isotopes from man made processes can be formed by a system based on estimates of total isotopes production across the world by all known (and to be known) facilities. These quantities can both be estimated, acquired or reported by the producers. Same can be used to determine release of CTBT related isotopes (Radio Xenon) by using...
Aftershock sequences following major earthquakes present great challenges to seismic bulletin generation. The analyst resources needed to locate events increase with increased event numbers as the quality of underlying, fully automatic, event lists deteriorates. While current pipelines, designed a generation ago, are usually limited to single passes over the raw data, modern systems also allow...
The enormous resources committed by the EU and other relevant partners in the design and development of the Virtual Data Exploitation Centre (vDEC) can only be justified if there is a greater use of this resources by Academics, Researchers and Scientists across the globe, particularly from the developing countries. The focus of this work is to determine the extent of the involvement of the...
Little is known about active volcanism in the ocean. As eruptions are attenuated by seawater and fallout does not regularly reach the sea surface, timing and exact location of volcanic processes remain poorly constrained. This problem can be overcome by the study of long-range underwater acoustics: It has recently been shown that eruptions at Monowai, a submarine volcano in the Kermadec Arc,...
Underground nuclear explosions (UNE) result in numerous signatures that manifest on a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. In case studies of legacy nuclear explosion sites, we demonstrate the scalar variability of surface and subsurface observables, briefly discuss current capabilities to locate, detect and analyze potential nuclear explosion locations, and explain how emergent...
An opportunity for improved detection sensitivity and reduced statistical uncertainty in analysis results from the CTBTO International Monitoring System (IMS) radionuclide stations might get of particular importance when dealing with special CTBT monitoring situations.
The radionuclide monitoring in the aftermath of the DPRK announced nuclear test in January 2016 triggered the development...
The Cepstrum technique is often applied to estimate arrival times of the depth phases which is an increasingly difficult task, as the event depth becomes small. For the shallow events, the delay time of the depth phase from the first onset can be small (<1s). Influence of path attenuation, low Q values within the weathering layers near the surface, topography and ever present noise make the...
We calculate broadband synthetic seismograms using the spectral-element method (Komatitsch & Tromp, 2001) for Jan. 6 2016 DPRK event (Mw(USGS) 5.1). We use Earth Simulator system in JAMSTEC to compute synthetic seismograms using the spectral-element method. The simulations are performed on 8,100 processors, which require 2,025 nodes of the Earth Simulator. We use one chunk with the angular...
We have conducted extensive system tests of the On-Site Inspection RadioIsotopic Spectroscopy (OSIRIS) system, a spectrum-blind instrument for the acquisition and analysis of high-resolution gamma-ray spectra during on-site inspections under the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). Unlike most other spectrometers, the OSIRIS system does not display actual gamma-ray spectra, and its...
The refusal of the three Middle Eastern Annex II states that have not ratified the (CTBT), namely Egypt, Israel and Iran has held hostage the CTBT entry to force to political bargains based on cost-benefit approaches. All three countries do not have strategic reasons not to ratify the CTBT, but they linkage ratification to issues, outside the CTBT realm. To accurately diagnose the current...
How can the CTBT gain public awareness within the information-flooded global media? By tapping into preexisting religious, medical and nonproliferation networks, young CTBT advocates can reach a larger audience without building these networks from scratch. This presentation addresses these communities and proposes steps for coalition-building within each area. First, it examines the religious...
The availability of new technologies on the market presents an opportunity to enhance present functionality, resiliency, redundancy, and thus, overall reliability of IMS SHI stations, which are nearing the need of major recapitalization. Redesigned power and communications components introduce new remote monitoring capabilities with improved preventative maintenance measures. In addition,...
The African region is covered by 22 (primary and auxiliary) IMS seismic stations and 8 infrasound stations.The ability of these stations to be deployed for scientific purposes was assessed using two earthquakes that occurred in Ecuadoron 12 August, 2010 and 16 April, 2016. The data from these stations were used to locate both events. Some of the stations recorded data that were used to locate...
Infrasound is a technology for verifying compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. To quantify the capability of infrasound to detect and classify potential treaty violations, we need to assess both the detection threshold of the global network and the statistical properties of atmospheric signal propagation. Unlike seismic waves in the solid earth, infrasound propagates...
The Source Physics Experiment (SPE) series consisted of six underground non-nuclear chemical explosions in granite. The experiment focused on improving the nuclear monitoring community’s understanding of the seismo-acoustic signatures of buried explosions. We discuss the amplitude, impulse, and peak frequency of each shot with respect to explosive yield and depth of burial. The waveforms of...
In this study, some local networks of Iran are presented and their activity compare with regional network. Seismic networks are and will be probably forever the only tool that enables study of the detailed structure and physical properties of the Earth. Local seismic networks could effectively use checking seismic activity of any area with highest resolution and precision. Lots of small events...
During the GSETT-3 experiment and early days of the CTBT, discussions were held regarding the appropriate specifications for the primary and auxiliary seismic stations. Communications cost and digital storage availability were two of the reasons for specifying the relatively low rate of 40 samples per second (sps) for the collection and storage of seismic data. In fact several of the legacy...
The purpose of the Seismic and Hydroacoustic T-Phase Stations calibration activity is the verification of the stability of calibration parameters and instrument responses over time against reference values established at the certification/revalidation time. The calibration process implements the workflow and associated reporting of the calibration activity at each particular station....
The coincidence summing effect influence the accuracy of the measured activity in IMS filter sample measurement. This article describes the correction of coincidence summing effect in Filter sample measurement with HPGe spectrometer, including the mechanism of coincidence summing effect, the influence to the measurement, the method of correction and, the result of correction. The conclusion is...
CBM and CTBT are interdependent where CTBT serves as a CBM but for CTBT to be successfully implemented CBMs need to be put in place. CBM is one of the four elements of the CTBTâs verification regime and CTBT can provide a forum for exchanging information, data and facilitating cooperation and voluntary unilateral moratorium on testing is a key element of formal and informal CBMs and...
Myanmar is actively enhancing its nuclear science and technological programmes to support the peaceful application of nuclear science and technology for socio-economic development. Myanmar college students, unfamiliar with the intergovernmental organizations and regimes in place to reduce the dangers of nuclear weapons, tend to hold an ethnocentric perspective on nuclear weapon issues....
The theoretical study of collisional excitation of LiH with rare gas shows the presence of Argon (Ar) and Xenon (Xe) in the atmosphere. The determination of ab initio potential energy surface (PES) allows the description of the interaction between the rare gas Ar or Xe and the rotating LiH molecule. The close coupling (CC) approach is used to determinate the cross sections of collision. The...
The European Infrasound Bulletin highlights infrasound activity produced by mostly anthropogenic sources, recorded all over Europe and collected in the course of the ARISE project (Atmospheric dynamics Research InfraStructure in Europe). Data includes high frequency (>0.7 Hz) infrasound detections of 24 European infrasound arrays from 9 different national institutions complemented with CTBT...
The Geodetic and Geophysical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences joined to the Atmospheric dynamics Research InfraStructure in Europe (ARISE2) project in 2016. This year we have deployed an infrasound array in Piszkesteto, Hungary. The array is the first infrasound station in Hungary and it consists of 4 elements, equipped with SeismoWave MB3d microbarometers and wind noise...
Gravity measurements indicate variations in the earth’s gravitational field caused by lateral differences in density of the subsurface soil or rock or the presence of natural voids or man-made structures. Microgravity surveys are used for the near-surface geologic investigations, as geotechnical, environmental and archaeological studies. Geologic and geotechnical applications include the...
With the advent of the twenty-first century, science and technology development has been becoming increasingly more global. In order to accomplish large-scale agreements, such as the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, it is important to get various stakeholders involved in the technology development and implementation. These stakeholders include university research groups, national...
The International Data Centre (IDC) is conducting a three-phase, multi-year re-engineering project to improve capabilities and long-term maintainability of their system for acquisition, processing, and analysis of seismic, hydroacoustic, and infrasonic (SHI) data. The primary goal of phase 2 of this project (just completed) was to specify and design a new software architecture that will meet...
- The hi skills of the inspection technique that we need in OSI team, after my experience in the IFE14 , and Visiting Nevada Nuclear Test site : enhancement skills of the inspectors in the Visual observation is very important for all because some of observable signature well be removed by the state or disappear directly and others are not easier to detect after the UNE is happened , also I...
Is well known that one of the more accurate method to predict a possible volcanic eruption is by the seismic monitoring. The ideal way to do it is complementing and matching the seismic data with other type of monitoring like infrasound, soil deformation measured by GPS, relevant chemistry and minerals variation in the hydro-thermal system around the volcano, heat measure of the ash plumes and...
The CTBTO’s International Monitoring System (IMS) includes 6 hydrophone based monitoring stations. During 2016 the Engineering and Development Section within the IMS Division installed the final hydroacoustic station at the Crozet Islands, France. The installation of HA04 was a challenging ocean engineering and logistical undertaking due to the the Crozet Islands’ location in the 'roaring...
The IMS IS35 infrasound station located in Tsumeb, Namibia is managed by the Geophysics Division of the Geological Survey of Namibia. Located at the Geophysical Research Station in the northern part of Namibia 16km east of Tsumeb, an established mining town, the station is locally managed by a Chief Geotechnician assisted by a geotechnician. Conditions are wet in the summer months and...
In the USSR, since 1965, has implemented program for nuclear explosions in commercial and industrial applications. All nuclear explosions for industrial and commercial purposes carried out under the ground, so the classification they belong to underground nuclear explosions. Each of these experiments and experiments had their secret name. "Torch" - the first industrial nuclear explosion on the...
The accuracy of earthquake location is controlled by several factors, including the network geometry, available phases, arrival-time reading accuracy, and knowledge of the crustal structure. At 00:30 (UTC) on 09 September 2016, the North Korea conducted its fifth nuclear test. Because lack of near station and poor network geometry, it’s difficult to determine the location of the fifth nuclear...
This research presents an analysis of gravimetric observations at the Lenkaran station (Azerbaijan) with coordinates: 38.733360N, 48.833724E. The station is located on the western seaside of the Caspian Sea. The distance of the site station from the seashore of the Caspian reaches 10 km. The tidal gravity observations were performed during more than two years (from July 2013 to December 2016)....
There are lots of challenges producing earthquake recorders and matching of second length of various instruments where they produce separately but use together in a networks. Second in electronic systems has a specific definition and it is the number of clock oscillation of an oscillator that producer declare in a specific temperature. As an example a 16MHz oscillator means that this...
LLNL has developed a capability for radiation detection instrument training that enables the use of detection instruments against realistic radiation sources/scenarios of interest to CTBT on site inspection. The sources and scenarios include, for example, short-lived relevant radionuclide radioactivity that is distributed on the surface inside an inspection area or might be contained in sample...
During the operations of certified IMS (International Monitoring System) radionuclide particulate stations, a Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/QC) system is carried out to ensure that the data produced are of acceptable quality and the stations are working within the requirements. The station QA/QC is carried out by the station operators according to the operation and maintenance...
There is no universally established definition of a "small state", even though so-called small countries form a majority of UN members. In many respects, major powers have decisive impact on issues pertaining to international peace and security, while combined influence of small states on world affairs remains limited. However, as we observe more emphasis on multilateralism and concert-type...
By using existing technology for radioxenon detection and making it less complex it would be possible to manufacture very reliable and less costly systems compared to the ones used today. The resulting decreased sensitivity of the individual systems would be more than compensated by increasing the number of measurement nodes, and placing them in an array configuration. Such arrays would have...
In 2014 a development project – SAUNA III - was started at FOI with the goal to substantially improve performance and capability of the SAUNA II system, which currently is installed at 17 IMS locations. The project plans were presented at the 2015 S&T conference. At the end of 2016, the SAUNA III prototype was ready. Compared to SAUNA II, the SAUNA III prototype operates with increased air...
Lake Kivu is a collapse ditch lake immediately located in the western branch of the East African Rift. In the lake kivu bassin region the seismic activity of the Rift and the volcanic activity constitute the most serious geological risks from which facing the population. Until 2015, there was no seismic sensor installed in the region to monitor the lake Kivu bassin. In 2016, three seismic...
September 9, 2016 at 9:30 am local time on the territory of North Korea recorded a magnitude 5.3 seismic event. The epicenter was located near the settlements located in 20 kilometers from the nuclear test site Pangiri. Give a high probability that North Korea had conducted a nuclear test on the occasion of the anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic. The US Geological Survey...
In this paper we present the process of selection and preparation of waveform templates for the cross-correlation detection of seismic events. Selection of the template based on parametric characteristics of the set of previously received records of seismic events in a given region. Parametric characteristics includes the list of recorded seismic phases, the parameters of the autocorrelation...
The establishment of National Data Centres (NDC’s) by member states helps in the monitoring and verification efforts of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). The core mandate of the CTBTO is to ban all nuclear test explosions. Almost all the West African countries have signed and ratified the CTBT. Ghana being a signatory and a ratified member state of the...
The Link to the database of the International Seismological Centre (ISC) provides both PTS and National Data Centres a dedicated access to datasets maintained by ISC using specially designed graphical interfaces and database queries. This service gives access to several products: the ISC/ISS bulletins of natural seismicity of the Earth, mining induced events, nuclear and chemical explosions;...
Argon-37 is a nuclear explosion signature that is currently adopted for use in on-site inspections (OSI). Because of the OSI application, new automated equipment is now available to measure this isotope in a sensitive manner from subsurface samples. While use of the Argon-37 signature as a key indicator of a nuclear explosion is widely accepted for OSI applications, the use of this isotope for...
There have been around 100 scientific publications making direct use of or quoting results of CTBTO IMS data on atmospheric radioactivity monitoring following the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident. These are focusing on many areas of interest such as plotting the events of the explosion, analysing the environmental and biological impact of the release, and perhaps most...
We analyze signals measured by stations HRFI, PRNI, EIL, ASF, and MMAI from a long series of repeated blasts at the Eshidiya phosphate mine in Jordan. We estimate the dependence of the cross-correlation coefficient on signal length and frequency band using all pairs of events detected at a given station. A small set of signals having the highest similarity with all other signals are used as...
The Cloud computing has been used more and more in many data centers due to the computing and storage resources integration and optimization, the fast deployment of services, the enhancement of services availability and the complication reduction of system management. This paper introduces the new version waveform data processing system of CTBT Beijing National Data Center based on the Private...
The Infrasound Station IS48, in Kesra, Tunisia is part of the verification regime for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. IS48 is managed and maintained by the Tunisian NDC. Its good location in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea allows to have various and interesting detections. Several signals with different signatures were recorded and identified, but since 2010, the station has...
Electromagnetic pulse has been excluded from the IMS technologies because its high false alarm rate due to lightning discharges. Here we examine a possible method of overcoming this obstacle by merging infrasound data with electromagnetic measurements. Theoretical estimations predict a detection rate of one lightning per second for a typical electromagnetic receiver which is capable of...
Here is the the thermal insulation system and automatic heating of air sampler «SNOW WHITE» for IMS radionuclide station (for example station RN61 (Dubna)). During sustained operation of IMS radionuclide stations CTBTO on Russia we have the problem of air sampler «SNOW WHITE». When the temperatures low than -25 Degrees Celsius (winter period), we will have the next problems of sampler: - the...
The 3rd OSI surrogate inspector training cycle started with a 14 day introductory course during October 2016 in Slovakia followed by a seven day course on Health, Safety and Security in The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The training impact can be a challenge to measure, maybe impossible. Trainers and trainees can develop a feel for this measure using a two-tier concept, namely: 1. Increase the...
This presentation presents a novel framework for time series classification that leverages the geometric structure of covariance matrices when labeling signals. Our method maps each signal to a new multivariate localized feature signal (MLFS) representation, from which we compute a covariance descriptor. This robust MLFS covariance representation handles classification tasks when the sample...
The Article IV section B the CTBT defines the IMS, which is responsible for verifying compliance with the Treaty. Data generated by the IMS and processed by the IDC are often fragmented because some data is below the detection limit. This implies that they need to be reconstructed using autoregressive models for more advanced statistical analysis. The use of advanced statistic allows...
Displacement spectra from explosion accelerograms within a few kilometers (<3.5 km) of shot points indicate that the spectral level increases gradually from the fc towards the zero frequency. In this paper, we present a time-domain expression (TDSF) which has two deformation terms: "static" and "dynamic", supporting this observation. For f<fc, the static contribution dominates the dynamic...
In November 2014 during routine access of the IMS waveform data from the secure signatory account at the Kenyan National Data Centre (KE-NDC), it was noted that the times of the IMS waveform data requested/queried was different from that displayed on the actual waveforms. This was rather intriguing since the understanding is that the times for all stations of the CTBT network are in...
Seismic waves are characterized not only by their propagation properties (i.e. velocity and direction of propagation) but also by the local particle motion trajectories they generate. These particle motion trajectories are the polarization properties of the waves and play a large part in identifying and extracting the seismic phases. To study the polarization, 3-component data are required....
Releases from industrial facilities, due to mainly Medical Isotopes Production facilities (MIPs) and in a lesser extend to Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), are at the origin of the worldwide radioxenon background and lead to specific activity concentration levels at the most noble gas stations of the IMS network. In parallel, owing to the tremendous atmospheric dilution, signature of an...
Motivation for a radical change in approach to interactive analysis suffers from the QWERTY syndrome, which shuns the retraining burden associated with redesigning repetitive manual actions of high acuity. Perhaps for this reason, the IDC waveform software re-engineering project does not envisage such change. All software for the interactive analysis of individual seismic events (as opposed to...
Source characterization of low-magnitude seismic events (M 4-5) is very important for intraplate seismicity studies, like in Brazil. The events are often recorded just in a few regional seismic stations (>300 km), and, velocity models are highly uncertain. We propose determination of moment tensors with the application of a new technique – the waveform envelopes inversion, pre-constrained by...
State of Kuwait has a typical dry desert climate which involves deposition and resuspension of atmospheric particulate matter. The International Data Center (IDC) of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), has been processing radionuclides data received from the RN40 station located in the state of Kuwait. The data include gamma-ray spectrometry, meteorological data, as...
There have been significant technological and scientific revolutions in the fields of seismology, acoustics, and radionuclide sciences with regard to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) which opened for signature in 1996. It is valuable to pause now and observe the arcs of progress evident in the body of research results reported in the literature related to improving monitoring...
In this work we present numerical simulations of tsunami waves generated by earthquakes and landslides in the region of the western Black Sea. We take into account three main seismic sources (two of them placed near the northern coast of Bulgaria and one near the northwestern Turkish Black Sea coast), and two hypothetical landslides (one subaerial and one underwater). The motion of the sliding...
Following the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi power plant, the IAEA Nuclear Science and Instrumentation Laboratory has developed an unmanned aerial vehicle based mobile gamma spectrometry system for environmental monitoring and mapping. The system is based on a commercial hexacopter and includes a variety of detector options, including cameras, Geiger-Mueller spectrometer and LaBr...
The atmosphere is a complex system submitted to a large set of disturbances including i) high frequency waves from volcanoes, thunderstorms, tornadoes, explosions, ii) gravity and planetary waves at lower frequencies iii) stratospheric warming events which can impact the troposphere during weeks. The infrasound network of the International Monitoring System (IMS) developed for the verification...
The Comoro-Islands, formed along the process of a mantle plume moving eastward within the Somali plate (e.g. Emmerick & Ducan, 1982), are four volcanic Islands, Grand Comore (1148km2), hosting the active "Karthala volcano" (rising up to 2361 m .al), Moheli (211km2; 790m al.), Anjouan (424km2; 1595m al.), and Mayotte (374 km2; 660m al.), which respective eruptions are estimated generally 10...
The International Monitoring System (IMS) consists of 337 facilities, 321 monitoring stations and 16 laboratories, built and distributed worldwide. These facilities send different types of raw data in near real time to the International Data Center (IDC) using a dedicated Global Communications Infrastructure (GCI) that provides timely and reliable transmission of IMS data. IDC distributes IMS...
The unmanned UAV platform allows make gamma spectrometry in severe nuclear release situation where manned aerial radiation measurements are not acceptable. The system consist of solid state Kromek GR1 Cadmium Zink Telluride (CZT, active volume 1 cm3 ) or Canberra Osprey Lanthanum Bromide (LaBr3, active volume 43.5 cm3) gamma-ray spectrometer, Intel 32/64 architecture PC Stick computer and...
Precise and high-quality decay data of radioxenon nuclei are fundamental for the CTBT. Radioactive decay quantities, such as half-life, gamma-ray emissions (intensities and energies), internal conversion coefficients, X-ray energies, conversion electron and Auger electron emissions, branching ratios of the decay modes, are used in the analysis of spectral data from the noble gas monitoring...
One of the CTBTO achievements over the recent years was the concretization of the project Noble Gas (NG) into Operations. The main milestones included the certification of 25 NG systems of the International Monitoring System (IMS) and the installation of NG processing software pipeline in the International Data Centre (IDC). Data from certified NG systems are reviewed by IDC Analysts on a...
Shallow seismicity at Occidental side in Bolivia is not usual particularly if it was felt at the capital cities, the impact is big enough to stop all activities from two to seven days, obviously this kind of seismicity is related to geological faults which are plotted but not all of them are described, by described we mean that there are not a moment tensor solution. On 1st October 2014 and...
The Navy conducts "full ship shock trials" (FSST) on new warships to assess the combatant's ability to withstand the effects of nearby underwater explosions. On June 10, June 23, and July 16, 2016, three FSSTs were carried out on a Littoral Combat Ship off the Florida coast. The three events, with magnitudes in the range of 3.7-3.8, were well recorded in the eastern United States by the U.S....
The Integrated Field Exercise of 2014 (IFE14) was a field event held in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (with concurrent activities in Austria) that tested the operational and technical capabilities of an On-Site Inspection (OSI) according to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The IFE14 tested in integrated manner already developed OSI techniques, including geophysical seismic...
CTBTO is establishing a global monitoring system for atmospheric xenon radioactivity as part of the International Monitoring System (IMS). Daily activity concentrations have been collected worldwide for over 15 years, of which the past 5 years with reviewed results in IDC Operations, providing unique data sets with long term time series that can be used for the identification of regional sinks...
During the last 5 years a complex research of the main environmental components of testing sites of the STS have been carried out. It was found that biological components of the environment either at the territories with high tritium concentrations in channel water. It can be assumed that all well-mouth sites of underground tests at the «Balapan» site can be potential sources of tritium uptake...
The default means of confirming the nuclear nature of an explosion is to detect radioactive noble gases which seep out slowly from underground tests and sometimes escape detection entirely. Detection of antineutrinos coincident with a seismic signal from the International Monitoring System (IMS) or other seismic networks could provide a tool to more rapidly verify the true nature of a suspect...
Under a collaborative work between the Geophysics Department of Universidad de Chile and the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission, a long-term project was started based on the infrasound data from stations IS13 (Easter Island) and IS14 (Robinson Crusoe Island) in order to improve the natural phenomena hazard assessment by developing remote monitoring tools with already existing infrastructure in...
Since the geophysical fields are interconnected with each other, it is possible to expect a response to earthquakes in all geospheres. Tsunamis occur only after those earthquakes that are associated with the rapid formation on the bottom of the ocean discharges, avalanches, landslides. This shift acts on the principle of the piston and pushes the water, causing the formation of a tsunami. In...
Seismic interferometry is applied to extract reflection Green's Functions (GFs) at PDAR, Pinedale, Wyoming, USA. The possibility of extracting crustal reflector structure beneath each station of this well-calibrated IMS primary seismic array is assessed, and the resulting GFs are interpreted using existing geophysical information, including borehole data. Here we address two issues identified...
ABSTRACT Earthquake with magnitude ≥ 7, epicenter in the sea, and depth <100 km, is not always able to generate a significant tsunami. It’s need other parameters that can be used as an indicator of a potential tsunami, namely the duration rupture, dominant period, and T50Ex. In 2013, we develop determination of potential tsunami application with real time waveform from InaTEWS network, and...
• In the late 80-ies of the last century, it was noted that Cs-137 contamination of the ground has been significantly diminished after the nuclear explosion in the shaft (vertical hole) at Semipalatinsk test Site (STS). Sites around 3 old tested nuclear shafts 1350, 1365 and 1412, have been surveyed on 1997-1998. Global fallout level of Cs-137 in the region of STS was on 1997-98 about 2.0-2.5...
The velocity structural model of Seymareh dam, central Zagros region, is computed using recorded data from local seismic network of Seymareh dam and Velest one-dimensional inversion technique. The study has performed after creating the catalog by phase picking of all data recorded during the network operation from 2010 to 2015. 3000 events were processed, at radios of 50 km and filtered down...
The objective of this poster is to present the efforts made by the Provisional Technical Secretariat (PTS) over the last six years to assess and improve the robustness and efficiency of Wind Noise Reduction Systems (WNRS) used within the IMS (International Monitoring System) infrasound network. This work includes modelling of the frequency response of the different types of WNRS. It also...
Seismic noise generated by wind was analyzed at five co-located seismic and infrasound arrays. The main factors affecting the noise level were identified as (a) external structures as antenna towers and vegetation, (b) borehole casing and (c) local lithology. The wind-induced seismic noise peaks in the spectra can be predicted by combination of inverted pendulum model for antenna towers, free-...
Atmosphere dynamics can be studied using radioisotopes long-term data series. Such tracers, like 7Be are recorded by the CTBTO through the radionuclide network of the International Monitoring System (IMS). The worldwide collection of activity concentration provided by the network built up unique data sets for scientific research. IMS data have being previously used to correlate beryllium...
The sixth workshop on the signatures of man-made isotope production (WOSMIP) was held November 28 through December 2nd in Bariloche, Argentina. CTBTO, PNNL and INVAP jointly organized the event, where 81 participants representing 27 countries took part. More than 60 contributions, among oral presentations and posters were submitted. This workshop continued the tradition of bringing together...
Xenon International is a new ground-based radioxenon measurement system being developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) built to realize the lessons learned from the International Noble Gas Experiment. Specifically, the Xenon International system provides better sensitivity to radioxenon isotopes, faster throughput of samples, and higher reliability of operation. The goal...
Xenon radioisotopes may be a clear signature of nuclear explosions, so that their detection, by the International Monitoring System (IMS) of the CTBTO, is of paramount importance. However, the emission of Xenon radioisotopes also from other sources, challenges the capability of the IMS to identify significant events out of this background, the isotopic composition of the Xenon trace becoming...
