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Satellite Radar Measures Tohoku, Japan Earthquake

April 1, 2011
This radar image, called a coseismic interferogram, using satellite data from the European Space Agency's Envisat depicts ground displacements resulting from the March 11, 2011, magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake in Japan.

This radar image depicts ground displacements resulting from the March 11, 2011, magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. It was created by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech ARIA project using satellite data from the European Space Agency's Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar. The image, called a coseismic interferogram, was created by comparing radar data acquired over the region on February 19, 2011 -- before the main shock -- and on March 21, 2011, spanning the March 11 main shock and a subsequent magnitude 7.9 aftershock. One color cycle in the image (from purple to yellow to green to blue and back again to purple) represents 50 centimeters of ground motion in the radar's line of sight (approximately west at 41 degrees from vertical). The total surface displacement in the line of sight measured by this interferogram is about 2.5 meters (8.3 feet).

See PIA13975 to see a version in Google Earth.

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