Application Prospects of Distributed Optical Fiber Sensing Technique in Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Seismic, infrasonic, and hydroacoustic monitorings are three types of remote waveform monitoring techniques stipulated in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Currently, the seismic, infrasonic, and hydroacoustic stations of the CTBT International Monitoring System (IMS) have traditional electrical sensing equipments. The distributed optical fiber- sensing technique is a new sensing method for determining variations in the vibration and strain at each point along the optic fiber based on the optical effect, and it has broad application prospects in the CTBT. The principle and development of the distributed fiber-sensing technique show that it can be directly applied to the detection system for obtaining vibration data during seismic, infrasonic, and hydroacoustic monitorings and applied to existing optical fiber communication facilities for obtaining supplementary information to the monitoring data. The detection system based on the distributed fiber-sensing technique exhibits distributed measurement, high sensitivity, and good stability. This study provides a new approach to improving seismic, infrasonic, hydroacoustic, and other detection equipments. However, the characteristics of the distributed optical fiber-sensing system, such as highly dense channels, high sampling rate, and a large amount of data, pose new challenges to the real- time processing of monitoring data. In addition, the impact of the distributed fiber-sensing technique on IMS monitoring capability should be further investigated.