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AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung
AGA 3: Verification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and Nuclear Verification
AGA 3.1: Talk
Wednesday, March 19, 2014, 17:00–17:30, UDL HS2002
2013 Russian Fireball Largest Ever Detected by CTBTO Infrasound Sensors — •Lars Ceranna1, Christoph Pilger1, and Alexis Le Pichon2 — 1BGR / B4,3, Hannover — 2CEA / DAM / DIF, Arpajon
On 15 February 2013 at 03h20 UT, a large Earth-impacting fireball disintegrated over the Ural Mountains near the city of Chelyabinsk. The bolide produced shock waves that blew out windows, injured hundreds of people and damaged buildings in many surrounding cities. Infrasonic waves generated by the explosion propagated over very long distances. The event was globally detected by 20 arrays part of the 44 operating infrasound IMS (International Monitoring System) stations of the CTBTO (Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization). This fireball event provides a prominent milestone for studying, in detail, infrasound propagation traveling twice around the globe for almost two days at distances larger than 80000 km. Therefore, its analysis offers a unique opportunity to calibrate detection and location methods and evaluate the global performance of the IMS network. The presentation will provide an overview on the global recordings and analyses. Moreover, in order to explain the detection capability of the overall operating IMS network, range-dependent propagation modeling considering both a point-like explosive source and a line source is performed.