Our study compares correlator performance when we deliberately inject templates into earthquake signals relative to baseline operation that processes target waveforms injected into data that is absent of known seismicity. We find that a correlator that uses an explosion‐sourced template and that can reliably detect a 1.7 ton shallowly buried explosion in background noise (a 0.97 detection rate) is unlikely to detect the same event in noisy earthquake interference (a 0.37 detection rate). This masking remains significant when explosion and earthquake origin times separate by as much as 100 s. We also find that the performance of correlators that use a template sourced by an earthquake is even more degraded and can fall from a 0.92 to a 0.16 detection rate during earthquake swarms. We conclude that earthquake seismicity can mask explosion signals with significant probability and that swarms can also mask significant repeating earthquake seismicity.
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