SCEC Award Number 14101 View PDF
Proposal Category Collaborative Proposal (Data Gathering and Products)
Proposal Title Advances in imaging shallow fault zone deformation with differential LiDAR: a VISES Collaboration
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Edwin Nissen Colorado School of Mines J Ramon Arrowsmith Arizona State University Srikanth Saripalli Arizona State University Michael Oskin University of California, Davis
Other Participants Tadashi Maruyama and Koji Okumura are our international collaborators on this VISES proposal. We do not yet have the names of the two students (one from CSM, one from ASU) who will be involved.
SCEC Priorities 2a, 1d, 4c SCEC Groups Geodesy, USR, SoSAFE
Report Due Date 03/15/2015 Date Report Submitted N/A
Project Abstract
 The objective of the project is to improve lidar differencing techniques using two recent Japanese earthquakes as examples of events captured by "before" and "after" high-resolution topography data. 3-D displacement fields imaged with lidar differencing are associated with shallow fault slip, and these were compared with deeper slip (imaged with InSAR) and surface offsets (measured in the field) to investigate the nature of the "shallow slip deficit". Initial results were published in EPSL in late 2014 and were also presented at several meetings in late 2014. These included a plenary talk at the SCEC annual meeting, a talk at the UJNR meeting in Sendai, Japan, an invited talk at the GSA meeting in Vancouver, Canada, and a poster at the December 2014 AGU Fall meeting.
Intellectual Merit In the future, 3-D displacement fields obtained by differencing repeat lidar datasets will be a powerful tool for mapping coseismic fault zone deformation in Southern California, which already contains widespread, research-grade lidar coverage. This project advances topographic differencing techniques by applying them to two recent Japanese events, two of the first three earthquakes ever captured in this way. We show that lidar-derived displacements retain coherence in the interior fault zone, where InSAR usually decorrelates, and we therefore demonstrate the utility of these new techniques for mapping shallow fault slip.
Broader Impacts The project has helped us develop collaborations and share knowledge with Japanese scientists Tadashi Maruyama and Koji Okumura. It motivated a visit by Dr Maruyama to ASU and CSM universities in Spring 2014, and partially funded Prof. Okumura's trip to the SCEC Annual Meeting in September 2014. These followed a visit to Japan in late 2013 by lead investigators Nissen, Arrowsmith and Oskin, to run a SCEC-supported science workshop on high resolution topography at the University of Tokyo (http://www.opentopography.org/index.php/resources/VISES_JPN13). Nissen later also traveled to the 2014 UJNR meeting in Sendai, supported by SCEC, where he presented much of this work in front of leading Japanese and USGS earthquake scientists and agency representatives. Such collaborative activities and active engagement with Japanese scientists are central to the success of the VISES program.
Exemplary Figure Figure 2. (a) Pre- and (b) post-earthquake bare-Earth DTMs spanning the 2008 Iwate-Miyagi earthquake in northern Honshu. (c) Elevation changes determined by subtracting pre- DTM from post- DTM reveal large mass movements, whilst (d) 3-D displacements from ICP alignment of the two datasets reveals coherent coseismic motions.
Linked Publications

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