Pipeline Implementation of Real Time Event Cross Correlation for Nuclear Treaty Monitoring

Abstract:

The United States National Data Center (US NDC) is responsible for monitoring international compliance to nuclear test ban treaties. This mission is performed through real time acquisition, processing, and evaluation of data acquired by a global network of seismic, hydroacoustic, and infrasonic sensors. Automatic and human reviewed event solutions are stored in a data warehouse which contains over 15 years of alphanumeric information and waveform data. A significant effort is underway to employ the data warehouse in real time processing to improve the quality of automatic event solutions, reduce analyst burden, and supply decision makers with information regarding relevant historic events. To this end, the US NDC processing pipeline has been modified to automatically recognize events built in the past. Event similarity information and the most relevant historic solution are passed to the human analyst to assist their evaluation of automatically formed events. This is achieved through real time cross correlation of selected seismograms from automatically formed events against those stored in the data warehouse. Historic events used in correlation analysis are selected based on a set of user defined parameters, which are tuned to maintain pipeline timeliness requirements. Software architecture and database infrastructure were modified using a multithreaded design for increased processing speed, database connection pools for parallel queries, and Oracle spatial indexing to enhance query efficiency. This functionality allows the human analyst to spend more time studying anomalous events and less time rebuilding routine events.