2013 UNAVCO Community & Facility Bridge Proposal: Geodesy Revealing the Earth in Action

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1255679MillerThis Cooperative Agreement (CA) between NSF and UNAVCO, Inc. supports continued management and operation of the national Earth sciences Global Positioning System (GPS) and geodetic technology support facility (?the UNAVCO Facility?). Activities supported include planning and engineering support for GPS and geodetic technology field projects, active management of continuously operated GPS networks, campaign GPS project and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) project support, technology development and testing, data services and education and community engagement activities. All these activities are external to activities UNAVCO manages on behalf of the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) and which are currently and separately funded via a Cooperative Agreement managed by the EAR/EarthScope Program. Support for this CA includes NSF Division of Earth Sciences and Polar Programs funding as well as support from the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). UNAVCO, Inc. is a non-profit corporation governed by a Board of Directors elected by the UNAVCO membership comprised predominantly of U.S. academic institutions with active research programs in geodesy. There are currently over 100 member institutions and nearly 80 associate (non-voting members) which including foreign universities, international government observatories, academies, and agencies. It is noteworthy that the consortium membership has grown by some 53% since the time of submission of the last Facility support proposal in 2007. Specific activities to be supported under the CA include: 1) maintenance of a pool of state-of-the-art GPS (currently 350 receivers in the Facility pool) and portable tripod mounted ?terrestrial laser scanners? (TLS; currently 6) available to NSF-supported scientists;2) continuing support for maintenance, telemetry and ultimate archival of semi-permanent continuous GPS station observations with station locations spanning the globe (currently 2,200 cCPS stations provide data to the UNAVCO Facility archive, not counting the ca. 1,110 cGPS station that comprise PBO);3) provision of personnel dedicated to NSF and NASA funded GPS and TLS project planning, logistics and field engineering support (ca. 60-70 non-Polar region projects supported each year and 30-40 Polar projects per year and ca. 30-40 TLS projects supported each year with rapid growth in the latter);4) maintenance and operations of the 61 stations in the NASA Global GPS Network (GGN), a subset of the International GPS Network (IGS) that provides crucial data to the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) needed for International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) solutions;5) development and maintenance of a GPS data archive (now approaching 39 Tb of storage with rapid growth forced by the evolution of near 100 cGPS stations that now record observation at high rate , 1 Hz or greater, and web-based access tools;6) maintenance and development of an archive and distribution system for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) scenes used for interferometric (InSAR) study of the continuum deformation fields associated with tectonic, volcanic, seismic and subsurface fluid dynamics over spatial scales of 100s of kilometers (the archive contains thousands of scenes of spaceborne SAR imagery from the European Space Agency ERS 1, ERS2, EnviSAT, Canadian RadarSAT and German TerraSAR X SAR satellites; some 20 Tb of holdings);7) planning and coordination of various geodetic community activities (e.g., scientific workshops, steering committee meetings);8) development, evaluation and testing of new commercial GPS and geodetic technologies (e.g., antenna phase center calibrations, novel power and telemetry solutions for semi-permanent cGPS and co-located environmental sensor stations, testing of new GNSS capable receivers that are capable of recording new U.S. GPS, European Galileo and Russian GLONASS carrier frequencies);9) ensuring a representative and responsive governance process on behalf of the U.S. academic research community using precision geodetic techniques; and10) provision of education and outreach materials and web-based tools to students and the public about precision geodetic research applications, the Earth sciences, and UNAVCO.