Airborne and terrestrial LiDAR coordination for The Great Southern California ShakeOut

Today at 10 am The Great Southern California ShakeOut staged an Mw=7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault to raise public awareness of earthquake hazards and to allow public responders and the scientific community to practice their response to such an event. As part of the scientific response, UNAVCO is coordinating community equipment deployment and data acquisition activities via their Great Southern California ShakeOut Response discussion forum. A sub-forum, coordinated by David Phillips, is tracking the airborne and terrestrial LiDAR response to the earthquake. As of 12:23 pm (CA time), TLS resources from University of New Mexico LiDAR Lab and NCALM are availble to respond to the event. NCALM and UT Austin Center for Space Research have also confirmed that they could respond with airborne scanners and aircraft.

LiDAR acquisition immediately following a large, ground-rupturing earthquake on the San Andreas system, will be of great importance to preserve slip distribution, offset features and to provide a post-earthquake snap-shot of the landscape that could then be differenced with the recently acquired B4 or GeoEarthScope LiDAR topography datasets to provide information about near-field deformation along the fault rupture.