Development of Software to Digitize Historic Hardcopy Seismograms from Nuclear Explosions

Of the 2210 nuclear explosions detonated since 1945, approximately 1400 have not been captured by any significant number of digital stations. Therefore, it is important to be able to reach back in time and recover recordings of nuclear explosions detonated in the pre-digital era. To do this, large numbers of paper and photographic recordings of nuclear explosions must be scanned (some of which has already been done). Once scanned, there remains the daunting task of automatically digitizing many 10s of thousands of records and placing them into a format that can be used by the seismic community. This project will develop a software package geared specifically towards the automatic digitization of hardcopy seismograms from historic nuclear explosions. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardeeAlthough the software is expected to be targeted primarily toward the digitization of nuclear explosion monitoring data, we anticipate that it also would be applicable to a plethora of other historic signals ranging from nuclear containment and well-hole data to EKG and historic weather data.