Explosion analysis from images: Trinity and Beirut

TL;DR

This paper applies a historical explosion analysis method to images of the Beirut 2020 explosion, estimating its energy yield and discussing the method's applicability based on video data.

Contribution

It adapts a nuclear detonation analysis technique to civilian explosion images, providing a new estimate of Beirut's explosion energy and evaluating the method's effectiveness.

Findings

Estimated Beirut explosion energy: 2.3 TJ (0.6 kt TNT)

Method successfully applied to online video images

Results align with other recent estimates

Abstract

Images of an explosion can be used to study some of its physical properties. After reviewing the key aspects of the method originally developed to study the first nuclear detonation and analyzing the Trinity blast data, the method is applied to the Beirut explosion of August 2020 by using images from videos posted online. The applicability of the method is discussed and the process of selection, extraction, and analysis of the data is presented. The estimate for the energy yield of the Beirut explosion is found to be $2.3^{+1.1}_{-1.1}$ TJ or $0.6^{+0.3}_{-0.3}$ kt of TNT equivalent. The result is consistent with others recently appeared in the literature using different methods. Notice that this article includes content that some readers may find distressing.