The IDC Seismic,Hydroacoustic and Infrasound Global Low and High Noise Models

The International Data Centre (IDC) in Vienna, Austria, is determining, as part of automatic processing, sensor noise levels for all seismic, hydroacoustic, and infrasound (SHI) stations in the International Monitoring System (IMS) operated by the Provisional Technical Secretariat of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). Sensor noise is being determined several times per day as a power spectral density (PSD) using the Welch overlapping method. Based on accumulated PSD statistics a probability density function (PDF) is also determined, from which low and high noise curves for each sensor are extracted. Global low and high noise curves as a function of frequency for each of the SHI technologies are determined as the minimum and maximum of the individual station low and high noise curves, respectively, taken over the entire network of contributing stations. An attempt is made to ensure that only correctly calibrated station data contributes to the global noise models by additionally considering various automatic detection statistics. In this paper global low and high noise curves for 2010 are presented for each of the SHI monitoring technologies. Except for a very slight deviation at the microseism peak, the seismic global low noise model returns identically the Peterson (1993) NLNM low noise curve. The global infrasonic low noise model is found to agree with that of Bowman et al. (2005, 2007) but disagrees with the revised results presented in Bowman et al. (2009) by a factor of 2 in the calculation of the PSD. The global hydroacoustic low and high noise curves are found to be in quantitative agreement with Urick’s oceanic ambient noise curves for light to heavy shipping. Whale noise is found to be a feature of the hydroacoustic high noise curves at around 15 and 25 Hz.