Seismic Data Archive in the United Kingdom to support Nuclear Test Monitoring

In 1961, AWE Blacknest became the home of Forensic Seismology in the UK, with the aim of developing and maintaining a capability to provide seismological advice to the UK government. During the 1960s the group set up a seismometer array in Scotland and worked with host countries to set up arrays in Canada, Australia (now both IMS stations), India and Brazil. AWE Blacknest has continuous data archives from these sites dating back to 1961 on a mix of paper helicorder records (seismic and infrasound traces), analogue FM-encoded tape and digital tape. From 2006-15 Blacknest developed and ran an extensive programme to overcome the ageing issues presented by vintage magnetic media condition and formats, and recovered and digitised the tapes, putting the continuous data on to modern computer storage systems. Since the 1990s data have been directly recorded to digital storage systems. Historically only events of interest, including data recorded from suspected nuclear explosions, were extracted, and Blacknest is running a programme of analysing these events and preparing the data and analysis in a form for public release. I will present on the work undertaken to develop the programme, data recovery and digitization methods from magnetic media, and the modern storage systems Blacknest use for serving seismic data. This will also include analysis work and the data inventories that Blacknest is making available.