Motivation
Earthquakes are one of the most important contributors to time- and space-dependent changes in the earth’s surface observed by NASA space geodetic satellites and systems. Observation of phenomena associated with these sudden and extreme events, together with analysis via modeling and numerical simulations, are critical if we are to find answers to two fundamental questions as posed in recent NASA planning documents of the Solid Earth Science Working Group:
- What are the motions of the Earth and the Earth’s interior, and what information can be inferred about the Earth’s internal processes?
- How is the Earth’s surface being transformed, and how can such information be used to predict future changes?
The last five years has seen unprecedented growth in the amount and quality of space geodetic data collected to characterize geodynamical crustal deformation in earthquake-prone areas such as California and Japan. The Southern California Integrated Geodetic Network (SCIGN), the Bay Area Regional Deformation (BARD) network, and the ERS 1/2 and JERS 1/2 Interferometric Synthetic Aperature Radar satellites are examples of systems designed to collect these geodetic data. The focus of this project is to foster the development and use of data assimilation techniques to support the evolution of numerical simulations of earthquake fault systems together with NASA space geodetic and other datasets. Our eventual goal is to develop the capability to forecast the earthquakes in fault systems such as those in California and in other earthquake-prone regions throughout the world. Another major goal is to foster international collaborations and develop an international web-distributed computaional environment to enable the study of earthquakes.
Objectives
Use web service technology to demonstrate the assimilation of multiple distributed data sources into a major parallel high-performance computing earthquake forecast model.
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