Seismo-acoustic study in United States and Israel

Large chemical explosions detonated close to the surface or on the surface generate two types of waves: seismic in the solid Earth and infrasonic in the Atmosphere, which deliver complimentary information about the source and about the corresponding propagation media. For the sake of this seismo-acoustic study in Israel we have provided the following deliverables:

1. We have built the new network of infrasound stations collocated with seismic and accelerometric stations of the Israel Seismological Network (ISN) and investigated the corresponding real-time monitoring system during four years of the project and beyond.

2. The seismo-acoustic monitoring system have been enhanced by incorporation of the two CTBTO infrasonic arrays — IMA on Mt. Meron and IOB close to Demona in the seismo-acoustic acquisition system and installation of the new 8 channel permanent infrasonic array in Lev-Yatir village (Negev, Israel) which provided continuous real-time transmitting of the array recordings to the HUB in Gll via cellular communication.

3. We have collected ground truth information (coordinates) about a large quantity of different quarries and the current quarry explosions in Israel.

4. We created a database of industrial and military explosions in Israel.

5. We have created a tool for analyses of infrasonic signals based on the Java language and the J STAR software

6. We have built the F-statistic detector, based on the Java language and the J STAR software.

7. We have processed a large quantity of screened explosion events using both seismic and infrasonic recordings for enhanced estimation accuracy of the source location.

8. We have built a new automatic procedure for detection, picking and location of quarry explosions using seismic and infrasonic phases.

9. For estimating infrasound propagation characteristics we have created tools to combine local meteorological sounding information with global meteorological specifications which were used to make the unique Israeli database of meteorological specifications for the range of altitudes from 0 to 150 km.

10. We have installed the infrasound GeoAc ray-tracer from the Los Alamos laboratory and computed infrasound propagation characteristics using the database mentioned above.

11. We have estimated the infrasonic travel times using the UTTR, USA military explosions database and created on this bases several new advantageous Bayesian infrasonic location procedures and compared them to the published software.