NASA Portal Details Land Motion Across North America

NASA, along with the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, 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 – whether from earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, or the extraction of underground natural resources such as groundwater.

Spearheaded by NASA's Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis, or OPERA, project at JPL, the effort equips users with information that would otherwise take years of training to harness. The project builds on data from spaceborne synthetic aperture radars, or SARs, to generate high-resolution data on how Earth's surface is moving.

Formally called the North America Surface Displacement Product Suite, the new dataset dates to 2016. By the end of 2025, the data will cover the entire United States, Central America, and Canada within 120 miles (200 kilometers) of the U.S. border.

The image shows how the portal visualizes land sinking over time in Freshkills Park, which is being built on a former landfill on Staten Island, New York. Landfills tend to sink over time as waste decomposes, compacts, and settles under its own weight. The blue dot marks the point on the land where the portal is displaying movement in the accompanying scatterplot.

Figure A

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Figure A shows the portal's visualization of uplift, or land rising, at the outlet of the Colorado River to the Gulf of California. The elevation is rising in portions of the area as sediment from the river is deposited there over time. As above, the blue dot marks the point for which the portal is displaying movement in the scatterplot.

Figure B

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Figure B shows a visualization of land movement near the city of Willcox, Arizona. The region is part of an area in which groundwater use is being managed by the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

To access the portal: https://displacement.asf.alaska.edu/

For more about OPERA: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/go/opera/