Improvements to a Major Digital Archive of Seismic Waveforms from Nuclear Explosions: Borovoye Seismogram Archive

Abstract : We are in the second year of a three-year project to generate in modern form an easily usable archive of digital seismograms derived from regional waveforms recorded at the Borovoye Observatory (BRV), northern Kazakhstan, over a thirty-year period going back to 1966 and spanning the time when state-of-the-art sensors and dataloggers were introduced at this site by several different western groups. The BRV seismograms, which include multichannel regional signals from 350 underground nuclear test explosions carried out in Eurasia, were made generally available to western scientists in 2001, but only as copies of the bits in the original digital waveforms. These copies contain large numbers of glitches and did not include instrument responses for approximately two-thirds of the events. In the first two years of this project, we are focusing on basic processing of the damaged waveforms to make them more easily usable by the removal of glitches and the inclusion of instrument responses (including absolute gains as well as poles and zeroes).

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