Reducing Background Seismic Monitoring to Minimum: A Single Station Monitoring

Summary High‑sensitivity background monitoring in areas designated for future nuclear waste repositories can, under suitable conditions, be achieved even with a single seismic monitoring station. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have significantly improved the detectability of very weak seismic events, which makes continuous monitoring more efficient and economically feasible while keeping operational exposure low. These benefits, however, depend strongly on the selection of sites with exceptionally low levels of ambient seismic noise. Without such favourable conditions, the performance of a single‑station setup decreases, particularly in terms of reliable event detection. Even with optimal noise characteristics, single‑station monitoring inherently provides only limited information about the spatial location of detected events. Precise hypocentre determination typically requires a small network of sensors. Nevertheless, valuable parameters such as event magnitude can still be estimated with reasonable accuracy from single‑station data. In some cases, it is also possible to infer long‑term patterns, including approximate historical event rates, which can contribute to understanding the seismic background of the monitored region. Although this approach cannot fully replace multi‑station networks, it offers a practical and cost‑effective solution for early‑stage monitoring or for long‑term background observations in areas where installing a full seismic array is not yet justified.