Following the opening for signature of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996, the Provisional Technical Secretariat was established and tasked with building up the International Monitoring System (IMS) that includes 80 stations for atmospheric radionuclide monitoring. Since then, specific knowledge and expertise in CTBT verification methods have been refined both at the equipment and analysis levels and the radionuclide component of the IMS has become a unique provider of global atmospheric radioactivity data of high sensitivity and time resolution. Radionuclide technologies include state-of-art systems for particle bound and noble gas radionuclide monitoring and use of specialized laboratories to support the reanalysis of samples. For each sample measured in the IMS, routine analysis products are generated with a list of observations and sensor sensitivities to geographic regions based on atmospheric transport modelling (ATM). Tailor-made and more sophisticated methodologies are used for expert technical analysis to support States Signatories in identifying the source of an event. The International Data Centre (IDC) provides quality reviewed products to the National Data Center that perform their own interpretation of the data to support the final judgement on the nature of the event by the States Signatories. The biggest challenge is to discriminate with high confidence between CTBT relevant detections against the normal background signals. This discussion panel is meant to inform and engage the INMM community on technologies and methods advances in use at the CTBTO PrepCom and the possible use of such technologies and methods for other uses for a broad range of scientific applications and for radiological and nuclear emergency response.
Year
2020
Abstract