Monitoring and Data Quality Issues of Mining Activites Around BRTR, Turkiye

Bogazici University-Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute (KOERI) is operating IMS Primary Seismic Station (PS-43) under Belbasi Nuclear Tests Monitoring Center for the verification of compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) since February 2000. PS-43 is composed of two seismic arrays (Ankara and Keskin). The medium-period array equipped with Guralp CMG-3TB instruments is located in the capital city of Ankara whereas the short-period array with Geotech 23900 sensors is located in Keskin. The data quality of the some of the array elements are degraded by the quarry blasts especially if there is an earthquake occurred at the same time with the explosion. There are more than 10 operational stone quarries spread across the city and there are more applications for new quarries each year. In this study, we show the importance of monitoring the quarry activities for the operation of the Turkish NDC. For this purpose, each blast is detected by automatically using cross-correlation and confirmed manually by the analyst.