UNAVCO is facing a period of unprecedented change associated with its reorganization as UNAVCO, Inc., the emergence of major new growth areas such as EarthScope/PBO, and ongoing developments in GPS and in related technologies. This period of rapid change involves some potential dangers (e.g. loss of focus) as well as many very exciting opportunities. I would bring to the Board of Directors a number of interests and biases of my own: (i) I believe that we should encourage diverse technical approaches to key technical problems, and should avoid emphasizing single vendor solutions and overemphasizing the advantages associated with standardization. I would argue, for example, that the IGS and (later) UNVACO emphasis on the DM choke ring antenna as a standard, though initially quite useful, persisted for far too long and has suppressed technological innovation in GPS antennas. (ii) I think we should encourage multiple-use CGPS networks whenever this can be achieved at a low incremental cost. (iii) I support targeted outreach efforts to encourage new interdisciplinary connections, and suspect that GPS contributions to hydrology, for example, may soon become as important as those being made in meteorology. (iv) I believe that crustal motion research executed outside of the USA makes very important contributions to our general progress in geodynamics and hazards research, and that we should not be so dazzled by PBO as to loose sight of this fact during the next five years. The targets are as important as the tools we use to study them, and some of the most interesting targets happen to be located in other parts of the world. (v) I suggest that UNVACO should be doing more to encourage friendlier and better engineered GPS processing software, and to encourage its community members to share more of the software they develop for analysis and modeling of GPS velocity fields.

Michael Bevis Biography

Michael Bevis obtained his B.Sc. and M.S. in physics before switching to geophysics. During his Ph.D. research at Cornell University, Bevis was exposed to crustal deformation research based on classical geodetic techniques (especially leveling) and tiltmeters. He was drawn into GPS by Rob Reilinger in 1987, and he started his first GPS project in the South Pacific in 1988, where he observed the fastest rates of relative plate motion (~ 25 cm/yr) on earth. In 1992 Bevis helped to develop the idea of ground-based GPS meteorology with Steve Businger, Chris Rocken and others, and participated in the first major demonstration experiment called GPS/STORM. In 1993 Bevis began a much larger crustal motion project in the Central and Southern Andes (which still takes up a large fraction of his time), and for several years he served on the UNAVCO Steering Committee. Bevis's work in the Andes persuaded him that a purely 'campaign' style of GPS fieldwork was not scaling very efficiently as networks became larger, and he advocated a hybrid approach based on positioning roving GPS receivers against regional arrays of CGPS stations, an strategy he called MOST. Bevis and Robert Smalley began to implement this strategy in S. America in 1995. Bevis maintains a strong interest in crustal motion research, and he currently works in South America, Antarctica, Hawaii and the South Pacific, as well as overseeing a very sparse but nearly hemispherical network of CGPS stations associated with tide gauges operated by NOAA and the University of Hawaii (UH) Sea Level Center. Bevis uses GPS to study plate tectonics, intraplate deformation, the earthquake deformation cycle, mountain building, glacial isostatic adjustment, sealevel change and environmental loading. In the area of GPS Met, Bevis has recently focused on water vapor climatology. Bevis presently leads the Pacific GPS Facility at UH, which contributes large quantities of CGPS data to the International GPS Service (IGS) via the SOPAC archive. He recently served on the Governing Board of the IGS.

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