Ground-Based Nuclear-Explosion-Monitoring

The mission of this program is to develop, demonstrate, and deliver advanced technologies and systems to operational monitoring agencies to fulfill US monitoring requirements and policies for detecting and characterizing nuclear explosions. Under this program, new methods and techniques for rapidly locating events and discriminating explosions from all other sources are being developed. Our requirement to transition from a teleseismic to a regional monitoring regime means that the number of signals that we must process has increased exponentially. We are working on advanced automated data processing techniques to assist analysts in identifying signals of interest.

GEO/EES-11 has helped craft the Protocols to the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, the Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Treaty, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and is now working as part of a multi-laboratory team under the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration Ground-Based Nuclear-Explosion-Monitoring Research and Engineering Program.

See also our Technical Publications or the great videos of mining explosions done conjunction with SMU.

For the layperson, the following are more simple explanations of our work, a look at the sometimes complex work in geophysics.

Our Work in Understanding Seismic Signals and Monitoring Nuclear Explosions - A Slide Show

Our Work in Kazakhstan - Decommissioning a Former Soviet Nuclear Test Site- A Slide Show

Seismic Discrimination - Being Able to Tell the Difference in Nuclear Tests and Other Explosions

Explosion Phenomenology - Understanding the Processes that Occur During Explosions