Publications Details

Applying Compression-Based Metrics to Seismic Data in Support of Global Nuclear Explosion Monitoring

Matzen, Laura E.; Ting, Christina T.; Field, Richard V.; Morrow, J.D.; Brogan, Ronald; Young, Christopher J.; Zhou, Angela; Trumbo, Michael C.; Coram, Jamie L.

The analysis of seismic data for evidence of possible nuclear explosion testing is a critical global security mission that relies heavily on human expertise to identify and mark seismic signals embedded in background noise. To assist analysts in making these determinations, we adapted two compression distance metrics for use with seismic data. First, we demonstrated that the Normalized Compression Distance (NCD) metric can be adapted for use with waveform data and can identify the arrival times of seismic signals. Then we tested an approximation for the NCD called Sliding Information Distance (SLID), which can be computed much faster than NCD. We assessed the accuracy of the SLID output by comparing it to both the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and the judgments of expert seismic analysts. Our results indicate that SLID effectively identifies arrival times and provides analysts with useful information that can aid their analysis process.