SCEC Award Number 25203 View PDF
Proposal Category Collaborative Research Project (Multiple Investigators / Institutions)
Proposal Title A Community Velocity Field Exercise and improvements to documentation and user needs for the CGM
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Michael Floyd Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ekaterina Tymofyeyeva National Aeronautics and Space Administration Kathryn Materna University of Colorado, Boulder Katherine Guns United States Geological Survey
SCEC Milestones A1-1, A3-5, A3-6 SCEC Groups Geodesy, CEM, CCB
Report Due Date 04/25/2026 Date Report Submitted 05/07/2026
Project Abstract
 Following feedback at a recent Community Geodetic Model (CGM) Workshop and the 2024 SCEC Annual Meeting, we propose to develop online documentation for the CGM covering multiple "levels of learning" for both beginner and advanced potential users. This will include tutorials on basic geodetic techniques and products, and examples of how to access, download and read the currently available CGM products and, eventually, updated model velocity and strain rate fields. This is aimed at consolidating research work to date on the CGM, making it as relevant and useful as possible to the SCEC community, and providing capacity for education about geodetic products. We will also lead a Community Velocity Field Exercise through which to move from geodetic products (time series and velocities) to geodetic models (velocity and strain rate fields) with contributions from and discussions with members of the SCEC community. Over the last several years, we have coordinated and contributed to the Community Geodetic Model (CGM), one of SCEC’s Community Earth Models (CEMs). Co-I Floyd has led efforts to rigorously vet and combine publicly available GNSS products; co-I Tymofyeyeva organized a Working Group focused on the improvement of InSAR time series generation; co-I Materna provided formatting and reading tools to help bridge the gap between technical expert and user; and co-I Guns contributed a major InSAR solution for the CGM. This proposal will support two early-career research scientists (co-I Tymofyeyeva at NASA/JPL and co-I Guns at the USGS), and one early-career faculty member (co-I Materna at CU Boulder).
SCEC Community Models Used Community Geodetic Model (CGM)
Usage Description The results presented here contribute to the Community Geodetic Model rather than using it.
Intellectual Merit The Community Geodetic Model (CGM) is one of the fundamental Community Earth Models (CEMs) researched, produced and disseminated to the scientific community and the public through SCEC. In addition to the development of the CGM web pages (e.g. https://southern.scec.org/research/cgm) and Explorer (e.g. http://moho.scec.org/cgm-explorer) over the last few years, documentation specific to the geodetic products and models is necessary for any user to understand how to access, interact with and interpret them. This project drafted and made available online a first iteration of a CGM user guide.
Broader Impacts Documentation and other asynchronous learning and training materials, such as examples and "cookbooks", are critical to the long-term accessibility and viability of SCEC's Community Earth Models for both experts and non-experts, and scientists and non-scientists alike. This initial iteration of documentation for the CGM not only describes the current version but also seeks to educate users of any geodetic products about the methodologies, including sources of signal and noise, common uses, limitations and repositories of commonly useful products and code.
Project Participants K. Materna (CU Boulder), K. Guns (USGS), K. Tymofyeyeva (JPL/NASA) and M. Floyd (MIT) all contributed to this initial draft of the CGM user guide, including text, figures, examples and relevant code. M. Floyd (MIT) converted the document to Sphinx documentation (https://www.sphinx-doc.org/), which is currently hosted at MIT (https://geoweb.mit.edu/~floyd/scec/cgm/docs/2.0.0/) but we anticipate will eventually be hosted at scec.org or ReadTheDocs.
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