Stable and transportable seismic yield estimation from local full-envelope template matching

We developed a multifrequency, full-envelope template approach to estimate surface explosion yield from seismic stations in the 5-50 km distance range. The new method is empirically based, transportable, and unlike other methods, it is designed to work for short-duration coda that a simple exponential single-scattering formulation in a homogeneous space does not model well. Our empirical full-envelope template-matching approach produces close fits to complicated short-duration and high-frequency waveforms observed at near-field distances. Moreover, because the envelope templates capture the nuances of the initial P and S waves and their scattered counterparts, the method is robust and provides roughly a factor of three times less scatter in yield measurement than peak P-wave and integrated first P-wave estimates. In this article, we demonstrate that our improved empirical template matching achieves accurate explosive yield estimates that are within 50% of the design yields at 95% confidence for a set of chemical explosions ranging in yield from 50 kg to 45 tonnes.