Adjoint backtracking for the verification of the Comprehensive Test Ban TreatytextjournalArticleIssartelJ.-P.autBaverelJ.autAn 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 the identification of sources after positive measurements. When several measurements are available the ambiguity about possible sources is reduced significantly. As an interesting side result it is shown that diffusion in the passive tracer dispersion equation is necessarily a self-adjoint operator.journal26213321502002continuingAtmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions