Science

UNAVCO is a university-governed consortium uniquely positioned to advance and support the geodesy community's science goals. Over the last decade, UNAVCO's scope has expanded significantly with many Collaborations to serve new science communities and including those who focus on the deformation of ice, the Earth's response to ground water, sea level, and other aspects of the hydrosphere, and renewed interest in imaging the structure of the atmosphere. Community Science showcases the UNAVCO community's applications of space geodesy and science products, and highlights their science.

Community Science

UNAVCO provides its community members a forum for publishing research in the various applications of geodesy.

• Science Applications of Space Geodesy cover many Earth science disciplined and are supported by UNAVCO to solve fundamental problems in geophysics.
• Highlights are short online articles covering recent science advances ... →and noteworthy UNAVCO community events.
• Research briefs are one-page reports included in past proposals summarizing current geodesy research supported by UNAVCO.
• Newsroom Links are provided to press releases, news articles, general announcements, and other media sources where UNAVCO, Plate Boundary Observatory, and EarthScope communities are prominent.
• Community Bibliography includes a collection of citations for refereed publications from key journals which mention UNAVCO and/or the Plate Boundary Observatory.
• Science Product Support are a set of resources based on geodetic and other research products for researchers, educators, and students.

Collaborations

UNAVCO collaborates with member institutions and other groups on a variety of projects.

• Africa Array – Pan-African Network of Observatories have expanded their geographic coverage and array of scientific instruments. UNAVCO provides critical data sets needed for addressing first-order questions about plate boundary tectonics and the rifting cycle, the hydrological cycle and climate change in Africa. This program is funded under an NSF MRI-R2 award.
• COCONet - Caribbean Network (Continuously Operating Caribbean GPS Observational Network) is an international geoscience community project to develop Caribbean-wide GPS observations which will support investigation of process-oriented science questions with direct relevance to Earth and atmospheric hazards, and to provide for regional capacity building focused on science and international collaborations.
• EarthScope includes multi-disciplinary observatories. This program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) deploys thousands of seismic, GPS, and other geophysical instruments to study the structure and evolution of the North American continent and the processes that cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It involves collaboration between scientists, educators, policy makers, and the public to learn about and utilize exciting scientific discoveries as they are being made.
• Hazard Response Efforts are coordinated by UNAVCO for community field activities, hardware, and data requests following an earthquake or other notable event.
• GSAC WS – Seamless Archive (Web-Services Enabled Geodesy Seamless Archive) is funded through the NASA ROSES ACCESS Program to facilitate comprehensive user access to a broad range of space geodetic data including GPS/GNSS, DORIS, SLR, and VLBI.
• INTERFACE - Lidar Scanning is a national facility to assist geoscientists obtain high-resolution, high-precision, three-dimensional surface data. And includes instrumentation, software, and instruction in the collection of earth surface data by Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), for users at any level.
• LARISSA - Larsen Ice Shelf is an NSF-funded initiative that brings an international, interdisciplinary team together to study the environmental change in Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf System and its global change implications.
• POLENET - Polar Observations is a network that dramatically improves geophysical observations across the Earth’s Polar regions and provides a legacy of observational infrastructure to enable new insights into the interaction between the atmosphere, oceans, polar ice sheets and the Earth's crust and mantle.
• RESESS - Student Interns (Research Experience in Solid Earth Science for Students) is an established and successful program for multi-year summer research internships for Earth science undergraduates from populations underrepresented in science. This high impact program recruits sophomores and juniors as research interns, and mentors them through the transition to graduate school.
• NLAS - Satellite Lidar Systems is a NASA ROSES funded project to integrate NASA IceSAT satellite and altitude airborne LiDAR into the OpenTopography system. It also lays the groundwork for data flow from the NASA DESDynI mission.
• Supersites Initiative - Geohazard Scientific Community is an initiative under the auspices of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and provides access to space borne and in-situ geophysical data of selected sites prone to earthquake, volcano, or other hazards through a web site hosted at UNAVCO.
• Western US Velocity Field - Crustal Deformation initiative focused on evaluating methods for determining a GPS velocity field that unifies all available campaign and continuous GPS data into a single solution with a common reference frame, with the goal of creating a unified velocity field and make it widely available through UNAVCO for research in active tectonics and earthquake mechanics, as well as application to natural hazards and precise geodetic positioning.
• WInSAR - Radar Remote Sensing is a consortium of universities and research laboratories established by a group of practicing scientists and engineers to facilitate collaboration in, and advancement of, Earth science research using radar remote sensing. WInSAR helps coordinate requests for data acquisition and for data purchase, aiding individual investigators by simplifying interactions with data providers and with government agencies funding science, including NASA, NSF, and the United States Geological Service (USGS).
• GSRM – The Global Strain Rate Map provides a global, self-consistent strain rate and velocity field model, constrained by geodetic and geologic field observations. It is the first model of its kind to implicitly add the kinematics of plate boundary deformation to a description of rigid plate motions. The model provides important input for seismic hazard, seismotectonics and geodynamics studies on a global and regional scale.
• SNARF - Stable North America Reference Frame working group convened under the auspices of UNAVCO, was established to define a tectonically meaningful reference frame for the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory.
• GEON - Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences is a past collaborative project sponsored by NSF to develop an integration of 3 and 4 dimensional earth science data.