Quantifying Uncertainty and Kinematics of Earth Systems (QUAKES) Analytic Center Framework and Imager

Abstract:

Quantifying Uncertainty and Kinematics of Earth Systems Imager (QUAKES-I) is designed to provide airborne color imaging and stereo photogrammetry products of targets such as earthquake ruptures, volcanoes, landslides, wildfire scars, glaciers, vegetation, and ecosystems. QUAKES-A (Analytic Center Framework)) is being developed to create a uniform crustal deformation reference model for the active plate margin of California. These two projects form hardware and software components of a new observing system to collect and fuse data from multiple instruments to improve data processing techniques and higher-level data products. QUAKES-I integrates a visible and short wavelength infrared remote sensing instrument suite to produce sub-meter topographic images at nadir along a 12 km swath, and 9 m resolution SWIR images along a UAVSAR image swath. 3D products will provide morphology and image pairs can provide change maps. The SWIR component can image wildfire fronts and validate UAVSAR polarimetric measurements. QUAKES-A will create a uniform crustal deformation reference model by fusing InSAR, topographic, and GNSS geodetic imaging data. Our approach is to infuse GNSS network solutions into UAVSAR baseline estimation and extract features from InSAR images, develop cluster analysis to identify crustal blocks and rank active fault systems spatially and temporally, interpolate the analyzed InSAR and GNSS data to provide an adaptively sampled deformation field, and assimilate and correlate the crustal deformation products into geodetic/seismicity-based earthquake forecasts and test against past data. The key challenge is harmonizing data products with widely varying spatial and temporal resolutions that provide one or more components of the 3D time-dependent deformation field and have unique error sources and different accuracies. We find boundaries between deforming regions using cluster analysis in GNSS data, edge detection on InSAR data, and for fault displacements in stereo photogrammetry data. We then assume continuity within the regions to produce the uniform deformation field. We expect that the uniform deformation field would serve as a reference model and would be updated over time. Users will be able to access and generate custom crustal deformation products for further analysis.