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Promoting Earth science by advancing high-precision techniques for the measurement of crustal deformation.

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Mission Statement

UNAVCO, a non-profit, membership-governed consortium, supports and promotes Earth science by advancing high-precision techniques for the measurement and understanding of deformation. UNAVCO also supports education to meet the needs of the community and the public.

Overview

UNAVCO is a consortium of research institutions, and its mission is to support and promote Earth science by advancing high-precision techniques for the measurement and understanding of deformation. Most of UNAVCO's members are geophysical geodesists who study deformation. The primary tool supported by UNAVCO has been GPS. However, UNAVCO is moving toward including support for other techniques useful for studying deformation. Borehole strainmeters, Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) are expanding the spatial and temporal signals that can be investigated with geodetic techniques. At the same time, GPS is finding applications in a frequency range that used to be the sole provenance of seismology, as GPS moves from one solution per day to one solution per second. UNAVCO is also expanding its role in education. These changes in UNAVCO are part of a conscious strategy to meet the future needs of the science community supported by UNAVCO. During the past year, UNAVCO developed a Strategic Plan to guide it through the next five years.

UNAVCO has staff and facilities in 6 locations with the majority of the staff located in Boulder, Colorado. The UNAVCO Facility in Boulder is the primary operational arm of UNAVCO. The UNAVCO Facility exists to support research using GPS and related technologies for solid Earth science. The Facility performs this task by providing state-of-the-art GPS equipment and field engineering support for projects; by installing, operating, and maintaining continuous GPS networks globally; by undertaking new technology development and evaluating commercially available products for research applications; by distributing and archiving GPS data and data products; and by performing and promoting educational and outreach activities.

UNAVCO is constructing the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO), a geodetic observatory designed to study the three-dimensional strain field resulting from deformation across the active boundary zone between the Pacific and North American plates in the western United States. With funding from the National Science Foundation, UNAVCO is installing GPS receivers and strainmeters and providing data and processed results that will be used to deduce the strain field on timescales of seconds to decades, and UNAVCO is supporting imaging and geochronology investigations to examine the strain field over expanded spatial and temporal scales. Most of the UNAVCO employees working on construction of PBO are grouped in a division created expressly for this purpose. This structure allows UNAVCO to manage PBO, and it insures that ongoing activities of the UNAVCO Facility in support of the science community are not adversely impacted. UNAVCO has five regional offices established to construct PBO.

UNAVCO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Employment Opportunities

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Last modified 2008-07-02 16:41:45 MDT (Date format is ISO 8601)
 

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