Whither the Transportable Magnetotelluric (MT) Array: Proposal for an EarthScope Community Workshop to Prioritize Targets for Transportable MT Deployments

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EarthScope is installing transportable magnetotelluric (MT) stations to record the plane-wave electromagnetic (EM) scattering signature of the Earth. These data are used to image the electrical conductivity of the Earth and produce new insights into the composition and physicochemical state of its interior. Magnetotelluric instruments are being deployed at permanent sites, and instruments are being used for mobile observations as well. The 20 magnetotelluric systems of the transportable array (TA) are each deployed for 1-month durations across the contiguous US with a spatial sampling of approximately 70 km in regions of identified interest. Funding limits the size of the deployments to ~60 sites/year. This proposal requests funds to support participants attending a short (1-day) workshop for 20 EarthScope scientists immediately prior to the IRIS Annual Workshop (4-6 June, 2008) to consider suggestions for target areas in 2009 and beyond. The key consideration for targets will be based upon community need, and the applicability of joint interpretation of conductivity with seismic velocity and attenuation to provide better constraints on composition and physicochemical state.