Real-time monitoring of the Russia-Ukraine conflict using seismic and infrasound array data

Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, daily media reports have shown the shocking effects of fighting and the inevitable devastation associated with war. However, getting a comprehensive and unbiased overview of the ongoing military attacks remains a challenge. The availability of geophysical data that can identify individual attacks provides much needed objectivity to this problem. The pressure waves generated by an explosion travel through the atmosphere and subsurface as sound and seismic waves, and their signature can be recorded by arrays of seismometers for ground motion or microbarometers for sound propagation. In this work, we demonstrate the first known case of using seismological data to detect conflict-related explosions in near-real-time. Using the Ukrainian primary station of the International Monitoring System (IMS), the Malin array (AKASG), we automatically locate explosions around the Kyiv and Zhytomyr provinces. We show how our resulting catalogue of explosions correlates with key events in the Ukraine conflict and how these data can be used to both verify and improve accurate reporting of military attacks. We analyze events with a variety of seismo-acoustic signatures and significant differences in explosive yield. These can be associated with various types of military attacks, including artillery shelling, cruise missile attacks and airstrikes. This work opens-up the possibility for future conflict monitoring using geophysical data.