Intellectual Merit
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Over the past 5+ years, most of southern California’s active faults have been scanned with airborne LiDAR through various community and PI-data collection efforts. Available data includes parts of the Eastern California Shear Zone (Oskin PI project and EarthScope); the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto faults (B4 project: Bevis, et al., 2005); the Elsinore, San Cayetano, Garlock, Panamint, and Owens Valley (EarthScope southern California data acquisition (SoCAL; Phillips, et al., 2007)); Fish Lake Valley (Dolan, PI), and the recently collected El Mayor–Cucapah data (NCALM, Oskin and Arrowsmith, PIs). All of these community datasets are currently publicly available via OpenTopography (http://www.opentopography.org) and powerfully depict the effect of repeated slip along these active faults as well as surface processes in a range of climatic regimes. These datasets are of great interest to the SCEC research and greater academic communities, geologic consultants working in southern California, and geoscience educators. This course is an important activity to develop a community of SCEC scientists, graduate students, and agency and consulting geoscientists who can fully harness the rich community LiDAR resources currently available to advance SCEC science priorities. |
Broader Impacts
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As was the case with our 2009 SCEC supported lidar short course, demand far exceeded capacity. In 2011 we received over 90 applicants to fill the 40 allocated seats in the course. In the end, selected participants included twenty-three graduate students and postdocs, as well as faculty, and professional geoscientists from agencies such as Caltrans, California Geological Survey, and the USGS. All short course materials, including lecture slides, exercises, and sample data are available on the course web site hosted by OpenTopography. (http://www.opentopography.org/index.php/resources/short_courses/11scec_course/). This page is an important community resource that expands the impact of the training materials beyond the 40 course participants. |