Sources of Error Model and Progress Metrics for Acoustic/Infrasonic Analysis: Location Estimation

How well can we locate events using infrasound? This question has obvious implications for the use of infrasound within the context of nuclear explosion monitoring, and can be used to inform decision makers on the capability and limitations of infrasound as a sensing modality. This paper attempts to answer this question in the context of regional networks by quantifying current capability and estimating future capability using an example regional network in Utah. This example is contrasted with a sparse network over a large geographical region (representative of the IMS network). As a metric, we utilize the location precision, a measure of the total geographic area in which an event may occur at a 95 % confidence level. Our results highlight the relative importance of backazimuth and arrival time constraints under different scenarios (dense vs. sparse networks), and quantify the precision capability of the Utah network under different scenarios. The final section of this paper outlines the research and development required to achieve the estimated future location precision capability.