2314379

Enabling Discoveries in Multiscale Earth System Dynamics: Geodetic Facility for the Advancement of Geoscience (GAGE) - EAR Scope - UNAVCO will develop, operate, and maintain a distributed, multi-user geodetic facility for the advancement of geoscience (GAGE). Geodesy characterizes the Earth's time-varying shape, orientation in space, mass distribution, and gravity field. It has revolutionized the geosciences by measuring Earth changes with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution.

The GAGE facility employs expert professional staff, with guidance provided by the scientific community, to manage and operate a set of foundational geodetic capabilities that are essential for current research support, as well as frontier geodetic activities that will enable future research. The facility will promote advances in our understanding of continental deformation, tectonic plate boundary processes, the processes that drive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and landslide hazards, continental water storage, atmospheric, ice sheet and glacier dynamics, and interactions among these components of the Earth system.

The geodetic capabilities provided through the GAGE facility contribute to issues of national/global strategic importance, including geohazard assessment and disaster resilience, environmental management and economic development, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and workforce development. Data products from GAGE will be used by federal agencies including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United States Geological Survey, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for missions including spacecraft positioning, satellite orbit, and timing corrections, earthquake, tsunami, and volcano early warning, weather forecasting, water resources, and environmental management.

State departments of transportation will use GAGE data to help support traffic monitoring and control, and increasingly GAGE data will support commercial sector positioning needs including for agriculture, construction and surveying, transportation (including air, rail, and maritime), mining and resource exploration, and fleet vehicle tracking.

The GAGE facility will manage and operate:

1) Global and regional continuously operating global navigational satellite systems (GNSS) and complementary geodetic technology networks;

2) Portable geophysical instrumentation for use in principal investigator-driven and community experiments;

3) Geodetic instrumentation testing and support service;

4) Data management systems for the collection, quality assurance, curation, management, and distribution of open access data and data products;

5) Education, workforce development, and public outreach programs that foster the development of the next generation geosciences workforce, are designed to be inclusive and enhance participation of traditionally underrepresented groups in the geosciences, and engage the public by highlighting advances in geophysical sciences and their societal relevance.

Innovative and transformative research that will benefit from GAGE examines both the dynamics of individual processes and the nonlinear interactions within and among larger Earth systems. The study of active processes from geocenter motion to the studies of the lithosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere requires understanding of the coupling and feedbacks across a range of length and time scales, and between the solid Earth and its fluid envelopes, in both physical and biological environments.

Under NSF and NASA partner agency support for GAGE, UNAVCO will integrate and federate a set of currently operated but at present independently managed GNSS stations to form the Network of the Americas (NOTA). UNAVCO will modernize NOTA stations with state-of-the-art, multi-sensor, multi-GNSS receivers with real-time streaming data and analysis. These enhancements will enable higher precision positioning than currently possible and new application of GNSS data that can be used for geohazards warning systems, study of ocean and atmosphere dynamical behavior, and observation of key environmental parameters such as water storage, soil moisture, and sea and lake-level changes.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Earthscope Consortium

THE GOAL OF THIS FUNDING OPPORTUNITY, "MANAGEMENT AND OPERATION OF THE NATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL OBSERVATORY FOR GEOSCIENCE", IS IDENTIFIED IN THE LINK: HTTPS://WWW.NSF.GOV/PUBLICATIONS/PUB_SUMM.JSP?ODS_KEY=NSF16546

47.050 - Geosciences

Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) [NSF]

Washington, District Of Columbia 20005-3929 United States

Single Zip Code

16-546

Amendment Since initial award the End Date has been extended from 09/30/23 to 09/30/25 and the total obligations have increased 272% from $10,860,647 to $40,350,881.