Stable and Transportable Seismic Yield Estimation from Full Envelope Template Matching

Abstract:

We have developed a transportable, empirically based, multi-frequency local template approach to estimate surface explosion yield from seismic stations that range between ~5 to 50-km distance with yield estimates within 50% of the design yield at 95% confidence using as few as 4 stations for events ranging between ~50 kg to 50 tons. Unlike the regional coda methodology developed by Mayeda et al. (2003) and the more recent synthetic template approach of Pasyanos et al. (2012), near-local coda is short in duration and not well modeled by the simple Aki-style (e.g., Aki 1969) exponential single-scattering formulation in a full-space. With only short durations and high-frequency waveforms at our disposal, our empirical full envelope template matching approach provides nearly an exact match to these complicated waveforms in the near-field. Moreover, as these templates capture the nuance of both the initial P-wave, S-wave and scattered counterparts, our method is very robust and provides roughly a factor of 3 times less yield measurement scatter than peak P-wave and integrated first P-wave estimates (e.g., Ford et al., 2014) and also utilizes a much larger amplitude signal. Time permitting, we will also consider near-regional recordings of surface explosions, Sayarim in Israel.