Inverse transport for the verification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

[摘要] An international monitoring system is being built as a verification tool for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.Forty stations will measure on a worldwide daily basis the concentration of radioactive noble gases.The paper introduces, by handling preliminary real data, a new approach of backtracking for theidentification of sources of passive tracers after positive measurements. When several measurements are available the ambiguity about possible sources isreduced significantly. The approach is validated against ETEX data. A distinction is made between adjoint and inverse transport shown to be, indeed, different though equivalent ideas.As an interesting side result it is shown that, in the passive tracer dispersion equation, the diffusion stemming from a time symmetricturbulence is necessarily a self-adjoint operator, a result easily verified for the usual gradient closure, but more general.

[学科分类] 大气科学