Waveforms from Nuclear Explosions (WFNE) Repository

Abstract

A key element of successful nuclear monitoring involves the assessment of any newly acquired data in the light of the vast amount of data previously recorded from historical nuclear explosions. To support this effort, the “Waveforms From Nuclear Explosions (WFNE)” repository was developed and is maintained by Leidos under sponsorship of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to provide convenient access to such historical data. It is built as a trusted data set, starting from the previous data repository “Nuclear Explosion Database (NEDB)” that was accessed in the past by numerous users in the US and international nuclear explosion monitoring community. WFNE includes detailed information (origin, bulletin, other geophysical data) on all the known 2157 atmospheric, underground, and underwater nuclear explosions detonated in the world between 1945 and 2017. It includes over 82,000 waveforms associated to 802 of the nuclear explosions ranging from digitized analog recordings for the oldest explosions to recent International Monitoring System (IMS) data, in CSS and SAC formats, and their station/instrument information, as collected from many sources. The web-based access and the presentation were updated and modernized and rendered ready for active user access. Users can search, visualize, and download data of interest for their own research. Data continues to be collected from newly identified sources. Recent efforts to rescue pre-digital seismic data via scanning and digitization provide interesting information to be added to WFNE, after completeness and quality checks. WFNE is open for the research community’s access to source parameter data and associated waveforms from worldwide nuclear explosions.