Support of UNAVCO Community and Facility Activities

Dense GPS observations in space and time are resulting in fundamental new discoveries in the earth sciences, discoveries that have an enormous impact on our understanding of global and regional plate tectonic interactions and have implications for mitigating earthquake and volcanic hazards in densely populated regions of the world. Support through this cooperative agreement will provide for the management and operation of the UNAVCO national Global Positioning System (GPS) support facility over a period of four years. The UNAVCO facility has historically provided centralized support to assist the geosciences community with the acquisition, archival, distribution, and application of high-precision GPS data to study solid-Earth processes and hazards through NSF and NASA support. Management responsibility for facility operations will be under UNAVCO, Inc., a recently incorporated (April 2001) and independent 501(c)(3) non-profit research organization. The UNAVCO, Inc. managed facility will provide assistance to researchers in all phases of GPS-facilitated geosciences research including: planning; equipment selection and equipment loans and/or procurement and budgeting assistance for necessary equipment; logistics and field engineering support for the monumentation and commissioning of GPS receivers in either permanent, continuously operated networks (CGPS) or discrete campaign-style occupations of GPS benchmarks; technology development activities; and data security, quality control, retrieval, archiving and analysis. The facility will also support NASA/Solid Earth and Natural Hazards (SENH) program activities and plays a crucial role in monitoring and maintaining a subset of NASA's GPS Global Network (GGN). In the latter, the UNAVCO facility will provide maintenance and security for the continuous operation of a large number of stations within the International GPS Service (IGS) network. The IGS network provides fiducial stations, orbits, and clock estimates for GPS users worldwide. Facility leadership serves as an advocate and technology advisor for high precision GPS research in the earth sciences. The facility will support community involvement in the governance and operation of the facility through providing support for interactions including: an annual community meeting; meetings of the steering committees and support of focused scientific workshops. Educational and outreach (E&O) activities will include the addition of a full time E&O Coordinator and the development of a student intern program. The UNAVCO, Inc. facility and management structure provide NSF and NASA with a single point of contact that allows for effective and accountable management of facility resources. NASA support of this facility will occur via annual interagency transfers through NSF.