Preliminary analysis of the International Data Centre pipeline.

The International Data Centre of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization relies on automatic data processing as the first step in identifying seismic events from seismic waveform data. However, more than half of the automatically identified seismic events are eliminated by IDC analysts. Here, an IDC dataset is analyzed to determine if the number of automatically generated false positives could be reduced. Data that could be used to distinguish false positives from analyst-accepted seismic events includes the number of stations, the number of phases, the signal-to-noise ratio, and the pick error. An empirical method is devised to determine whether an automatically identified seismic event is acceptable, and the method is found to identify a significant number of the false positives in IDC data. This work could help reduce seismic analyst workload and could help improve the calibration of seismic monitoring stations. This work could also be extended to address identification of seismic events missed by automatic processing