Uncertainty in the Predictive Capability of Detectors that Process Waveforms from Explosions

Abstract

Explosions near ground generate multiple geophysical waveforms in the radiation-dominated range of their signature fields. Multi-phenomological explosion monitoring (MultiPEM) at these ranges requires the predictive capability to forecast trigger rates of digital detectors that process such waveform data, and thereby accurately anticipate the probability that hypothetical explosions can be identified in operations. To confront this challenge, we derive and compare the predicted and observed performance of three digital detectors that process radio, acoustic and seismic waveform data that record a small, aboveground explosion. We measure this comparison with the peak range in magnitude ∆m (magnitude discrepancy) over which different performance curves report the same probability of detection PrD, within an interval of moderate detection probability, and thereby quantify solutions to three topical monitoring questions. In particular, our solutions (1) demonstrate how empirically parameterized detectors that operate in a variable noisy environments provide fair-to-very good forecasting capability to detect small explosions, (2) show that the observed performance of a particular waveform detector can better forecast performance curves constructed from different observations, when compared to theoretical performance curves, and (3) provide an upper bound on detection uncertainty, in terms of a physical source attribute (magnitude).