S53B-2827
Large-N Seismic Deployment at the Source Physics Experiment (SPE) Site
Friday, 18 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Catherine Mary Snelson1, Ting Chen2, Robert J Mellors3 and Arben Pitarka3, (1)Los Alamos National Laboratory, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (2)Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (3)Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, United States
Abstract:
The Source Physics Experiment (SPE) is multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary project that consists of a series of chemical explosion experiments at the Nevada National Security Site. The goal of SPE is to understand the complicated effect of earth structures on source energy partitioning and seismic wave propagation, develop and validate physics-based monitoring, and ultimately better discriminate low-yield nuclear explosions from background seismicity. Deployment of a large number of seismic sensors is planned for SPE to image the full 3-D wavefield with about 500 three-component sensors and 500 vertical component sensors. This large-N seismic deployment will operate near the site of SPE-5 shot for about one month, recording the SPE-5 shot, ambient noise, and additional controlled-sources. This presentation focuses on the design of the large-N seismic deployment. We show how we optimized the sensor layout based on the geological structure and experiment goals with a limited number of sensors. In addition, we will also show some preliminary record sections from deployment. This work was conducted under Contract No. DE-AC52-06NA25946 with the U.S. Department of Energy.
