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1996 Annual Report
1.0 Executive Summary
The enclosed report details the activities and accomplishments of the UNAVCO Boulder Facility for FY96 in fulfillment of the requirement to submit an Annual Progress Report and Budget (APR&B) to the National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Earth Sciences (EAR), Instrumentation and Facilities (IF) Program as specified in the UNAVCO award letter of November 4, 1996. As the first submission under this requirement, the enclosed report is retrospective in terms of providing historical and technical information required to fully understand and appreciate the scope of the UNAVCO Boulder Facility role in support of the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology for Earth sciences research. Future yearly reports will emphasize only those activities supported in that fiscal year, a projection of activities in the forthcoming year, and the respective budgets associated with those activities.
The crux of UNAVCO's support to NSF-funded Principal Investigators is in direct support of GPS data acquisition, data management and data archiving. The Boulder Facility fulfills this role by providing GPS equipment, field engineering, technology development, training, technology transfer, data management, and data archiving support on a priority basis to NSF-funded projects, and on a resource-available basis to a broader community of university investigators. Specifically in FY96, UNAVCO supported nineteen agent projects requiring equipment only, provided direct field engineering support for four major GPS campaigns, and supported the installation of seventeen permanent GPS stations, all on a worldwide basis. To accomplish this, UNAVCO maintains an extensive pool of GPS and ancillary equipment on behalf of the NSF, maintains a well trained and motivated field engineer staff, and conducts extensive technology development to implement state-of-the-art, cost-effective data measurement capabilities. Most hardware and software development in FY96 was in direct support of permanent GPS station implementations, especially the Basin and Range GPS network.
In the area of GPS data archiving, the Boulder Facility successfully implemented an upgraded Oracle-based relational database system in FY96 for the archiving of GPS data. This system, referred to as the UNAVCO Archive Database, allows data users to query the database by a multitude of data descriptors, referred to as meta-data, including project name, investigator, location, receiver type, antenna type, and many more. A 15 Gbyte RAID disk system was installed in FY96 to make data in the Archive Database Web-accessible via UNAVCO's Home Page. Several new software tools were created in FY96 to facilitate more automated entry of GPS data into the archive, both to increase efficiency of entry by Facility staff and to encourage investigators to more easily provide their own data for archiving without significant staff intervention. These tools are also de facto creating standards for GPS data collection including documenting complete meta-data. GPS data from 34 NSF-supported projects were in the Archive Database at of the end of FY96, fully accessible through the relational database query features, with 78 additional projects slated to be entered in FY97/98. Data from a total of 112 NSF-supported projects reside in various states in the UNAVCO archive repository with a concerted effort planned for FY97 to recover older pre-92 project data from another 60 NSF-supported projects, for which no data are currently in the archive, with assistance from the Universities of Miami and Texas at Austin.
With the increase in continuous GPS data collection from permanent stations in FY96, considerable engineering effort was expended by the Facility in developing improved data management tools. Data management refers to all the steps from initial data collection at the receiver to placing quality-checked data in an archive. These steps include downloading of the data from the receiver to an intermediate platform such as a PC, transmission of the data over a robust and reliable communications link, quality checking and formatting of the data, and entry of the data into the archive. Several new software packages to control and automate data download from various receivers to multiple computing platforms were completed, new technologies for data transmission were developed and implemented, and new data editing, translation and quality check software was developed and beta-tested. Activity in FY97 will include expanding these capabilities to different receiver and download platform types, making the code more robust, and improving user documentation.
A major activity for the Boulder Facility in FY96 in support of the GPS research community was the organization and implementation of a multi-million dollar purchase of GPS equipment made possible by a grant under the NSF Academic Research Infrastructure (ARI) Program. The UNAVCO Steering Committee submitted a proposal on behalf of the UNAVCO Community to the NSF Office of Science and Technology Infrastructure on February 27, 1995 and was notified of award in July of 1995. UNAVCO negotiated Vendor Ordering Agreements with the major GPS vendors by November of 1995 and during the next twelve months over 170 GPS receivers were purchased by the university ARI participants. The ARI purchase had a major impact on the Boulder Facility ranging from the extensive testing conducted to pre-qualify specific GPS equipment, development of detailed equipment specifications, negotiation of Vendor Ordering Agreements, arranging appropriate cost-sharing with the 28 ARI participants, receipt, acceptance testing and shipment of over 125 systems via the Boulder Facility to ARI participants, and ultimate financial and contractual responsibility to the NSF for the successful execution of the grant. The Boulder Facility received no additional funding support for its role in the ARI which subsequently contributed to expenditures in excess of the FY96 budget by several Facility groups. The ARI participants insisted that none of the ARI award be used by the Facility for implementation of the ARI award.
Equipment testing associated with the ARI GPS equipment purchase placed a considerable burden on Facility resources in FY96. Given the importance and magnitude of the ARI purchase, it was essential to perform complete receiver systems tests on what was in many cases new state-of-the-art GPS hardware. Appendix A includes the Table of Contents from the UNAVCO Academic Research Infrastructure (ARI) Receiver and Antenna Test Report of November 1995 which shows the extensive scope of the tests conducted. Based on these results, the ARI participants were able to purchase equipment based on the combination of price and performance that best met their research and operational requirements. Tests such as the UNAVCO/Ball Aerospace anechoic chamber antenna test provided more definitive antenna phase center measurements than had been previously available. These test results, available on UNAVCO's Home Page quickly became a GPS industry standard for assessing equipment performance that has been referenced by many non-UNAVCO groups such as the Southern California Integrated GPS Network (SCIGN) when they made their large receiver procurement for expansion of the Southern California network. The October 1996 NSF EAR/IF Panel Review of the UNAVCO Facilities Proposal requested that funding support for such future equipment testing be requested in a separately-submitted proposal. As a result, the Boulder Facility Development and Testing Group was eliminated in October 1996 and all equipment testing activities are awaiting the outcome of a funding decision on a December 1996 proposal submitted on behalf of the UNAVCO Community by the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
The programmatic and funding decisions of the October 1996 EAR/IF Panel reviewing the UNAVCO Facilities proposal had a dramatic impact on the Boulder Facility and other UNAVCO groups that had proposed activities under the proposal. The Boulder Facility received a $100,000 increase in funding to $1.5 million per year including University of Miami and Texas at Austin subcontracts and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography received $100,000 for GPS data archiving support for continuous GPS data, for a total $1.6 million award for UNAVCO Facilities. The UNAVCO proposal had requested $3,768,237 in support of community wide activities. The Panel encouraged the UNAVCO Steering Committee to submit separate proposals for activities in support of GPS data processing and improved measurement accuracy which were subsequently submitted in December 1996.
The Boulder Facility budget for FY96 was exceeded by a total of $93,224 or 6.3% in actual expenditures due to activities associated with the ARI implementation, the purchase of hardware for development and testing associated with permanent station implementations, and the purchase of the RAID data storage system, none of which were budgeted for FY96. These additional costs were paid with carryover funds from previous years. The FY97 award level required considerable prioritizing of Facility activities to maintain a high level of direct support for NSF-funded projects while allowing continued technology development critical to future GPS data collection methodologies. One casualty of the budget prioritizing by the UNAVCO Steering Committee was the future activities of the Steering Committee and Working Groups, including the Annual UNAVCO Community Meeting. Independent mechanisms for funding these activities will be identified and pursued by the UNAVCO Community in FY97.
1996 Annual Report - 23 SEP 1997
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