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Testing Event Discrimination over Broad Regions using the Historical Borovoye Observatory Explosion Dataset

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Abstract

We test the performance of high-frequency regional P/S discriminants to differentiate between earthquakes and explosions at test sites and over broad regions using a historical dataset of explosions recorded at the Borovoye Observatory in Kazakhstan. We compare these explosions to modern recordings of earthquakes at the same location. We then evaluate the separation of the two types of events using the raw measurements and those where the amplitudes are corrected for 1-D and 2-D attenuation structure. We find that high-frequency P/S amplitudes can reliably identify earthquakes and explosions, and that the discriminant is applicable over broad regions as long as propagation effects are properly accounted for. Lateral attenuation corrections provide the largest improvement in the 2–4 Hz band, the use of which may successfully enable the identification of smaller, distant events that have lower signal-to-noise at higher frequencies. We also find variations in P/S ratios among the three main nuclear testing locations within the Semipalatinsk Test Site which, due to their nearly identical paths to BRVK, must be a function of differing geology and emplacement conditions.

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Acknowledgments

This work would not be possible without the tireless efforts of researchers at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Los Alamos National Laboratory in compiling, deglitching and determining the instrument responses for thirty years of Borovoye data. We also thank the many people who worked at the Borovoye Observatory over the years to enable the decades of acquisition of digital recordings of seismic ground motion. This data is accessible at http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/Monitoring/Arch/BRV_arch_deglitched.html. We thank Paul Richards for providing boundaries of the Semipalatinsk Test Site (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~richards/Semi.boundaries.html). We thank Terri Hauk and Stan Ruppert for maintaining the LLNL Seismic Research Database, Eric Matzel for making many of the amplitude measurements used in this study, and Alan Sicherman for his assistance with statistical analysis. We also thank Doug Dodge and Mike Ganzberger for the Regional Bodywave Amplitude Processor (RBAP), the tool used to make our amplitude measurements. This work was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. This is LLNL contribution LLNL-JRNL-516095.

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  1. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, USA

    Michael E. Pasyanos, Sean R. Ford & William R. Walter

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  1. Michael E. Pasyanos
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  2. Sean R. Ford
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Correspondence to Michael E. Pasyanos.

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Pasyanos, M.E., Ford, S.R. & Walter, W.R. Testing Event Discrimination over Broad Regions using the Historical Borovoye Observatory Explosion Dataset. Pure Appl. Geophys. 171, 523–535 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-012-0591-4

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