NASA Research Aids Response to California Napa Quake

NASA data and expertise are proving invaluable in California’s ongoing response to the Aug. 24 magnitude 6.0 earthquake in Napa Valley, northeast of San Francisco. The quake was the strongest to occur in the San Francisco Bay Area in a quarter-century and caused significant regional damage.

Analyses by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, of airborne data from NASA’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), GPS data and radar imagery from the Italian Space Agency’s COSMO-SkyMed satellites, are revealing important details of how the ground deformed in the region and the nature of the fault movements. In addition, a NASA-funded disaster decision support system has provided a series of rapid-response data maps to decision makers at the California Earthquake Clearinghouse. Those maps are being used to better direct response efforts.

NASA has been monitoring active earthquake faults in California using a variety of remote sensing and ground-based techniques. The JPL-developed UAVSAR, in use since 2009, is an L-band Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument that flies mounted underneath a NASA C-20A Earth science research aircraft from NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, Edwards, California. UAVSAR is able to detect minute changes in Earth’s surface that occur over time between flights of the instrument. UAVSAR has monitored the Napa area about every six months since November 2009.

 

A comparison of UAVSAR data collected on May 29, 2014, three months before the quake, and on Aug. 29, 2014, five days after the quake, reveals that multiple strands of the fault slipped near the quake’s epicenter. A new UAVSAR image showing these changes is available at:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/pia18801