Definition of Exclusion Zones Using Seismic Data

In verifying compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), there is a motivation to be effective, efficient and economical and to prevent abuse of the right to conduct an On-site Inspection (OSI) in the territory of a challenged State Party. In particular, it is in the interest of a State Party to avoid irrelevant search in specific areas. In this study we propose several techniques to determine `exclusion zonesʹ, which are defined as areas where an event could not have possibly occurred. All techniques are based on simple ideas of arrival time differences between seismic stations and thus are less prone to modeling errors compared to standard event location methods. The techniques proposed are: angular sector exclusion based on a tripartite micro array, half-space exclusion based on a station pair, and closed area exclusion based on circumferential networks.