Oral Presentation

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission launched in July 2025 and is now distributing high resolution InSAR data globally. NISAR collects new acquisitions over all land and ice-covered surfaces every 12 days. NISAR’s L-band radar maintains coherence in vegetated environments better than C-band radar data and its unique left-looking geometry provides additional constraints on 3D displacement solutions. Such capabilities make NISAR data valuable for addressing fundamental questions in earthquake science by providing high resolution, accurate measurements of processes that drive the earthquake cycle.

Here we present some of the earliest results of NISAR and how these data complement existing geodetic systems and techniques. We first present NISAR’s high coherence in vegetated regions through an example in northern California near the Mendocino Triple Junction, where accurate surface deformation measurements cannot be reliably recovered by other InSAR satellites. We then demonstrate how NISAR’s left looking data complement other existing satellite data (Sentinel-1 or ALOS-2) by providing more imaging geometries to better solve for east, north, and up displacements. This capability is particularly important for north-south fault motions such as those along the San Andreas Fault, though north sensitivity is ten times worse than east and up because of the near-polar orbits.

We further demonstrate NISAR’s capabilities for global fault systems by highlighting preliminary results from the recent Mw 7.5 Venezuela earthquake, which ruptured more than 220 km of the strike-slip plate boundary between the Caribbean and South American plates. NISAR’s accurate displacement maps show continuous slip farther east than preliminary slip models and new fault traces approximately 700 m offset from previous fault maps. We show that high resolution phase gradient and coherence change results are crucial analyses in assessing damage extent and understanding immediate responses to large magnitude events. The analyses used for the catastrophic Venezuela event can be readily applied to other fault systems and will undoubtedly be a critical dataset for better understanding the earthquake cycle in California and worldwide.