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UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar)

Thursday, September 4, 2014

UAVSAR was deployed on Friday (8/29/14) to image the area around Napa, CA, following the magnitude 6.0 earthquake that occurred on Sunday, Aug. 24, collecting 12 lines covering a broad area around the epicenter, extending east and south to capture impacts to the water conveyance infrastructure of the Sacramento Delta. This flight supported emergency response for levee and aqueduct damage assessment and rapid imaging of fault slip that occurred across the region. The processing team was able to rapidly initiate the processing on Friday night so that Repeat-Pass Interferometric (RPI) browse images were available to investigators by Sunday and refined RPI products began to be delivered to investigators (Burgmann, Donnellan, Fielding, Jones, and Parker) Tuesday morning. With browse data, we were able to provide information to the California Department of Water Resources about movement along the San Pedro Bay shoreline by Sunday afternoon in support of their response activities and to the USGS to direct their ground survey crews. The UAVSAR images show slip details around the epicenter of the quake in areas where the X-band COSMO-Skymed data released earlier in the week were totally decorrelated. The results agree with ground surveys of movement on the main fault and provide much more comprehensive information about the movement that occurred across the region.

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