SCEC Award Number 11173 View PDF
Proposal Category Workshop Proposal
Proposal Title Imaging and Analyzing Southern California's Active Faults with High-Resolution LiDAR Topography: A Joint SCEC/OpenTopography Short Course
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Christopher Crosby University of California, San Diego Ramon Arrowsmith Arizona State University
Other Participants Mike Oskin (Davis), Sarah Robinson (ASU grad student), approximately 40 SCEC community members as short course attendees.
SCEC Priorities A1, A2, A10 SCEC Groups Geology, Geodesy, FARM
Report Due Date 02/29/2012 Date Report Submitted N/A
Project Abstract
 The SCEC supported short course, Imaging and Analyzing Southern California’s Active Faults with High-Resolution Lidar Topography, was held October 24-25, 2011 at the University of California, Davis. The primary course sponsor was SCEC, but UC Davis KeckCAVES and OpenTopography provided important additional support. As was the case with our 2009 SCEC supported lidar short course, demand far exceeded capacity. In 2011 we received over 90 applicants to fill the 40 allocated seats in the course. In the end, selected participants included twenty-three graduate students and postdocs, as well as faculty, and professional geoscientists from agencies such as Caltrans, California Geological Survey, and the USGS. The short course was a great success, and provided an excellent opportunity for participants to get their hands dirty with lidar topography data analysis. We combined focused lectures with extensive hands-on training with software and data. The course also stimulated lots of discussion on lidar data applications to earthquake science, tectonics, and surface processes among the diverse group of participants. We performed a post-course survey of participants and feedback was overwhelmingly positive with regard to the course content, organization, and execution.
Intellectual Merit Over the past 5+ years, most of southern California’s active faults have been scanned with airborne LiDAR through various community and PI-data collection efforts. Available data includes parts of the Eastern California Shear Zone (Oskin PI project and EarthScope); the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto faults (B4 project: Bevis, et al., 2005); the Elsinore, San Cayetano, Garlock, Panamint, and Owens Valley (EarthScope southern California data acquisition (SoCAL; Phillips, et al., 2007)); Fish Lake Valley (Dolan, PI), and the recently collected El Mayor–Cucapah data (NCALM, Oskin and Arrowsmith, PIs). All of these community datasets are currently publicly available via OpenTopography (http://www.opentopography.org) and powerfully depict the effect of repeated slip along these active faults as well as surface processes in a range of climatic regimes. These datasets are of great interest to the SCEC research and greater academic communities, geologic consultants working in southern California, and geoscience educators. This course is an important activity to develop a community of SCEC scientists, graduate students, and agency and consulting geoscientists who can fully harness the rich community LiDAR resources currently available to advance SCEC science priorities.
Broader Impacts As was the case with our 2009 SCEC supported lidar short course, demand far exceeded capacity. In 2011 we received over 90 applicants to fill the 40 allocated seats in the course. In the end, selected participants included twenty-three graduate students and postdocs, as well as faculty, and professional geoscientists from agencies such as Caltrans, California Geological Survey, and the USGS. All short course materials, including lecture slides, exercises, and sample data are available on the course web site hosted by OpenTopography. (http://www.opentopography.org/index.php/resources/short_courses/11scec_course/). This page is an important community resource that expands the impact of the training materials beyond the 40 course participants.
Exemplary Figure Short course - no figures generated.