Nuclear Explosion Monitoring (NEM) Research Scientific Solutions

The Government seeks to carry out a broad range of coordinated fundamental and advanced research that will accelerate development of decisive mission capabilities in geospace awareness through development of new algorithms to process data from seismic Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) systems to detect, identify, and track rapidly evolving and emerging threats from underground nuclear tests. Seismic DAS is defined as use of a fiber optic cable as an array of thousands or tens of thousands of virtual strain or strain rate sensors to acquire seismic measurements at densities several orders of magnitude greater than systems currently used in nuclear explosion monitoring. Currently, many DAS systems rely on phase-sensitive Optical Time Domain Reflectometry (φ-OTDR) of Rayleigh Back Scattering (RBS), but the scope of this research extends to processing ultra-high density seismic measurements from any fiber-optic cable data acquisition technology that might be developed while this research is carried out. Priority will be given to applied and advanced research in the following categories that has the most promise for assessing and improving seismic event detection and characterization.