The Refined USSR Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Database for Borovoye Geophysical Observatory

Abstract

This paper shows the results of the refined locations for underground Peaceful Nuclear Explosions (PNEs). Peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs) were made for industrial applications in the Soviet Union. This study is based on a comparison of PNEs’ parameters. These explosions were recorded by seismographic stations in Kazakhstan from 1966 to 1988. The monitoring/verification community generally utilizes PNE locations from Sultanov et al. (1999). In reality, there are errors and some PNEs are poorly located. Our locations were determined using an integrated approach encompassing published open literature sources and archive seismogram analysis from Borovoye Geophysical Observatory. Treated PNEs seismograms have been available to researchers since 2001. They became available after the cooperation between Russian and U.S. organizations. The first one was the Institute of Geosphere Dynamics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IDG RAS), the organization that operated the Observatory in the Soviet era. The second one was the National Nuclear Center of the Republic of Kazakhstan (NNC since 1992). The third one, from the U.S. side, was the Lamont‒Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University (LDEO). We present two digital seismograms of old-style seismograms from a digitized archive in ASCII format. We provide travel times for P-waves, some seismograms, and additional source parameters.

Keywords

• digital seismograms
• seismic instruments
• Soviet era
• nuclear testing