Identification of Quarry Blasts Aided by Infrasound Data

Abstract

We present our analysis of the detections from the Piszkés-tető, Hungary infrasound array that has been operational since May 2017. We introduce an automatic search method to associate infrasound detections with a preliminary list of explosions detected by the seismic network. Once infrasound detections are associated with seismic events, we relocate the events using both the seismic arrival time and infrasound azimuth observations. We validate our methodology on ground truth events, i.e., explosions confirmed by the mine operators. We demonstrate that seismo-acoustic locations are able to identify the source of explosions even for closely spaced quarries. The discriminative power of the infrasound azimuth is strongest at near-field distances, where local and regional seismic discrimination methods have the most difficulties.