This grant supports upgrade of the capacity, security and accessibility of the Western North America Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (WInSAR) imagery archive through acquisition of three Pentium 4 based mass store systems, each with Redundant Arrays of Internal Disks (RAID), and an additional dual 64 bit CPU compute server for WinSAR data pre-processing. WInSAR is an organization of 32 member institutions created to aid InSAR research by acquiring requested spaceborne SAR data and distributing them to the science community so that data and analysis techniques may be shared among researchers. The requested equipment would increase the capacity of the WInSAR online distribution server, which currently archives approximately 7500 scenes of ERS-1/2 and Envisat data for on-line access by academic and government institutions, to over 20,000 scenes. The upgraded WInSAR archive would support a range of geophysical and tectonic research by faculty and students at WInSAR consortium institutions. The traditional scientific focus of WinSAR investigators has been study of crustal deformation of the western part of North America and ramifications for understanding the geodynamics of the upper mantle, earthquake physics, volcanic, subsurface fluid and orogenic processes who rely on the InSAR technique for unique spatially continuous observation of deformation over broad areas (to 100's of km). The upgraded archive and on-line processing capabilities would immediately benefit and complement the scientific objectives of the MREFC funded EARTHSCOPE Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO). WInSAR data continue to support undergraduate and graduate student research at nearly all the consortium member institutions and the expanded archive would ultimately support acquisition of Japanese ALOS L-band SAR data at locations that extend beyond the traditional Western North America focus. Much of the research facilitated by archive holdings has implications for hazard mitigation, both earthquake and volcanic, as well as studies of anthropogenically influenced subsurface fluid movements.
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