Improvement of GT Classification of Soviet PNEs
Abstract
From the 1960's through the late 1980's, the Soviet Union conducted 122 Peaceful Nuclear Explosions (PNEs; Figure 1) across its territory. These PNEs are now very important to the seismological community as so-called Ground Truth (GT) events. The PNE locations are widely distributed, thus GT0-1 locations are very useful as calibration events for the development of seismic velocity models, model validation, seismic discrimination, etc. The monitoring/verification community generally utilizes PNE locations from Sultanov et al. (1999) as known or verified GT events. In reality, 43 of the 122 locations were determined seismically and are erroneous by up to 40 km. We have determined GT0-1 values for 26 of the seismically located events, and to validate or correct the locations of 59 PNEs thought to be GT0-1. Some PNEs currently classified as GT1 or better also have larger errors of up to 16 km. Locations were determined using an integrated approach encompassing published open literature, analysis of satellite imagery and regional seismic data. In addition, ten PNE sites in were visited allowing GPS coordinates to be obtained in the field.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 28, 2017
- Accession Number
- AD1135791
Entities
People
- Eric Bergman
- Kazuya Fujita
- Kevin Mackey
Organizations
- Michigan State University