Evaluation of the International Monitoring System and International Data Centre of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization

Evaluation and quality assurance activities of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) are reviewed with special emphasis on radionuclide technologies. The CTBTO carries out detailed evaluation in all fields of technical verification of the Treaty. The goal is to provide States Signatories with confidence in the quality of data from the International Monitoring System and data products of the International Data Centre. The largest technical evaluation effort has been the quality assessment of the operational software. About 1.3 million lines of source code and scripts were checked. Software characteristics, such as maintainability, were assessed using automated tool-based techniques and improvements were suggested. Specific to radionuclide technologies, several methods have been developed to cope with the large amounts of spectra produced each day by 80 radionuclide monitoring stations around the world. Some of the key evaluation results, such as the peak detection capability of the operational software are presented in detail.