Exploiting the skills of waveform data analysts in the quest for improved automatic processing

Over the past ten years analysts at the IDC have reviewed all signals detected automatically on IMS seismic, hydroacoustic and infrasound data which were associated to events in the final automatic event list (SEL3). They have retimed and/or changed the phase identification of many such detections, and almost 30% of events which appear in SEL3 have been discarded by analysts as invalid. Analysts have substantially modified a further 50% of SEL3 events. In addition, automatic processing misses potentially valid detections and events. Analysts must therefore build missed events from those automatically detected signals which have either not been associated to any event, or which have been wrongly associated, or which have been missed. Such events added by analysts constitute on average about 20% of events in the reviewed event list (LEB).