SCEC Award Number 24072 View PDF
Proposal Category Collaborative Research Project (Multiple Investigators / Institutions)
Proposal Title Including time-dependent 3D deformation and strain in the SCEC Community Geodetic Model: Method comparison and best practices
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Ekaterina Tymofyeyeva National Aeronautics and Space Administration Michael Floyd Massachusetts Institute of Technology Kathryn Materna University of Colorado, Boulder
SCEC Milestones A1-1 SCEC Groups CEM, Geodesy, CCB
Report Due Date 03/15/2025 Date Report Submitted 03/31/2025
Project Abstract
 This award continues work that we have led towards the production and expansion of the SCEC Community Geodetic Model (CGM). We have previously released GNSS and InSAR velocities and time series over Southern California. We have now initiated a "Community Velocity Field Exercise" to encourage and organize involvement and collaboration between groups who contribute to the CGM towards their combination for velocity and strain rate fields. We developed and hosted a CGM Workshop in conjunction with the SCEC Annual Meeting, at the Hilton Palm Springs in September 2024, at which we proposed this exercise and its parameters to an audience of interested contributors. We also brought together a sub-group to arrange plans for work in 2025 before SCEC proposal submissions in November 2024. A number of personnel transitions during late 2023 and 2024, between the submission of this award's proposal and the writing of this final report after the end of the award period, constrained the work that we envisioned towards the ultimate derived velocity and strain rate products, but our extension of the CGM Working Group, and expansion of the CGM area to cover all of California, have allowed us to understand the evolving needs of contributors and users. We have continued to develop the CGM Explorer as well as initiated searchable online documentation for the CGM, which we hope will provide examples of CGM access and use as well as describing the basis of the geodetic techniques and the methods for CGM products.
SCEC Community Models Used Community Geodetic Model (CGM)
Usage Description This award contributes organization, presentations and developing products for the Community Geodetic Model. No other SCEC Community Model *outputs* were used as *inputs* to research during this award.
Intellectual Merit This award supports a core element of SCEC, the Community Earth Models, specifically the Community Geodetic Model. There is a small but active and close community of geodetic researchers and users as well as the broader, non-specialist community studying California. This requires organizing regular meetings among the various stakeholders to lead the direction of the CGM effort. We undertake technical reviews of methodologies and combination approaches for GNSS and InSAR products from various, including internal Working Group, sources to ascertain a consensus of current and evolving best practices, which help the understanding of users and assessment of differences and uncertainties.
Broader Impacts This award supported the continuing organization of a large group within the SCEC community who actively research and contribute to the Community Geodetic Model. Many are graduate students and postdocs, plus many other early-career scientists including government agencies researchers and university researchers and faculty. Our awards to develop the CGM support a very broad spectrum of the SCEC community. We hosted a workshop that included academic attendees from the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and from local industry, demonstrating the wide-ranging interest and appeal of using geodetic datasets and products, and the community interactions around their development.
Project Participants Katia Tymofyeyeva and Zhen Liu (NASA/JPL), Mike Floyd (MIT), Kathryn Materna (CU Boulder), Gareth Funning and Li-Chieh Lin (UC Riverside), Lane Souza and Raymond Thicklin (SIO/UC San Diego), William Holt and Mradula Vashishtha (Stony Brook University), Scott Marshall (Appalachian State University).
Exemplary Figure Figure 1: Screenshot of the most recent version of the SCEC CGM Explorer, available at http://moho.scec.org/cgm-explorer, showing continuous (blue) and survey (orange) GNSS sites with velocity vectors colored by velocity magnitude relative to North America, line-of-sight InSAR velocities relative to the pixel shown by a white square (coinciding with cGNSS site P617) for descending track 173, and outlines of other available InSAR tracks.
Linked Publications

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