Source features, scaling, and location of calibration explosions in Israel and Jordan for Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) monitoring

Large-scale calibration in-land explosions of different designs were conducted recently in Israel and Jordan, under close collaboration between their national seismological institutions. The experiments were in the context of Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) monitoring in the Middle East and aimed to improve the Earth crust velocity models for calculating travel times to regional and International Monitoring System (IMS) stations, to extend the Ground Truth (GT0) database, and to observe and quantify dynamic features of seismic sources and elaborate scaling laws. The experiments contributed to the study of explosion source phenomenology in various geological settings and to understanding the main features of seismic energy generation from point-like sources, thus improving the classification of seismic events, which is the crucial issue of nuclear monitoring. The network and array observations obtained were used for joint location analysis of the explosions, based on up-to-date algorithms and software and Ground Truth parameters, and for estimation of location accuracy and improvement of regional velocity models. In conjunction with the developed velocity models, we compared the Ground Truth location and origin to those calculated using a standard location routine, the Levenberg-Marquardt procedure, and several beamforming techniques. We found that the Network Location Beamforming works best.