Seismic event identification

Earthquakes and explosions generate seismic waveforms that have different characteristics. However, the challenge of confidently differentiating between these two signatures is complex, and requires the integration of physical and statistical techniques. This article reviews the methods for constructing discrimination features from diverse physical observations. These discrimination features are appropriate for many statistical classification frameworks. Under the null hypothesis an event is an explosion, we discuss strategies for constructing P-values which can be interpreted as standardized discrimination features. We develop standardized discriminants for both teleseismic (simple propagation path in the mantle) and regional (complicated propagation path in the crust) events, following the trend toward characterizing increasingly smaller single-point explosions. (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.