Monitoring a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Within the Framework of the Digital Earth

摘要

The monitoring of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in the framework of the 'Digital Earth' (DE) is envisaged by discussing the integration of different monitoring techniques, the identification of decoupled explosions, and the on-site inspection (OSI) of suspect nuclear tests. For the proposed international monitoring system (IMS) which has turned its focus to the detection of low-yield explosions and the monitoring of a non-proliferation treaty in recent years, one of the challenging problems is the integration of different monitoring schemes including seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound, radionuclides, and satellite remote sensing. It is pointed out that the 'Digital Earth' can provide such an approach with a practical technical framework. The combination of the information from seismic monitoring and remote sensing is shown to be the most effective in detecting decoupled tests. The 'Digital earth' has the potential for such a combination and will be efficient in identifying decoupled explosions. In monitoring the CTBT, on-site inspection is a practically difficult and politically sensitive problem. Within the framework of the 'Digital Earth', this problem has new complexities which have to be dealt with in the realization of the monitoring function of an IMS. As a generalization of the existing IMS concept, we propose two new technical concepts: virtual on-site inspection (VOSI), and the 'Digital Earth' aided real-time international monitoring expert system (DEARTIMES).