{"id":230956,"date":"2025-06-07T03:07:52","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T17:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/?p=874495"},"modified":"2025-06-07T03:07:52","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T17:07:52","slug":"nasas-ready-to-use-dataset-details-land-motion-across-north-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/?p=230956","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s Ready-to-Use Dataset Details Land Motion Across North America"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A new online portal by NASA and the Alaska Satellite Facility maps satellite radar meas-urements across North America, enabling users to track land movement since 2016 caused by earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, and other phenomena.<\/div>\n
USGS<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

An online tool maps measurements and enables non-experts to understand earthquakes, subsidence, landslides, and other types of land motion.<\/em><\/p>\n

NASA is collaborating with the Alaska Satellite Facility in Fairbanks to create a powerful web-based tool that will show the movement of land across North America down to less than an inch. The online portal and its underlying dataset unlock a trove of satellite radar measurements that can help anyone identify where and by how much the land beneath their feet may be moving \u2014 whether from earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, or the extraction of underground natural resources such as groundwater.<\/p>\n

Spearheaded by NASA\u2019s Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA<\/a>) project at the agency\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the effort equips users with information that would otherwise take years of training to produce. The project builds on measurements from spaceborne synthetic aperture radars, or SARs, to generate high-resolution data on how Earth\u2019s surface is moving.<\/p>\n

Formally called the North America Surface Displacement Product Suite, the new dataset comes ready to use with measurements dating to 2016, and the portal<\/a> allows users to view those measurements at a local, state, and regional scales in a few seconds. For someone not using the dataset or website, it could take days or longer to do a similar analysis.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can zoom in to your country, your state, your city block, and look at how the land there is moving over time,\u201d said David Bekaert, the OPERA project manager and a JPL radar scientist. \u201cYou can see that by a simple mouse click.\u201d<\/p>\n

The portal currently includes measurements for millions of pixels across the U.S. Southwest, northern Mexico, and the New York metropolitan region, each representing a 200-foot-by-200-foot (60-meter-by-60-meter) area on the ground. By the end of 2025, OPERA will add data to cover the rest of the United States, Central America, and Canada within 120 miles (200 kilometers) of the U.S. border. When a user clicks on a pixel, the system pulls measurements from hundreds of files to create a graph visualizing the land surface\u2019s cumulative movement over time.<\/p>\n