Development of a GPS Seamless Archive

The Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Center (SOPAC) has completed development of software for UNAVCO's GPS Seamless Archive Center (GSAC). The GSAC is a collection of GPS data archives and their operating agencies that have agreed to exchange information about their individual data holdings. GSAC allows a user to locate GPS data and metadata from these different archives through a single interface; hence GSAC is an operating virtual observatory for continuous and "campaign" GPS data. Data providers collect or generate data and then supply the data to data wholesalers. Data wholesalers collect and archive data and metadata, from one or more data providers. GSAC currently has 7 U.S.-based data wholesalers (NASA's CDDIS, UC Berkeley's NCEDC, NGS, CWU's PANGA archive, SCEC, SOPAC, and UNAVCO). Together these archives hold over 2 million GPS data (RINEX) files collected for over 10,000 monuments, including a nearly complete set of data collected between 1986 and 2003 for the global network and western North America, and a significant quantity of data collected by U.S. scientists in other tectonically active regions. Data retailers collect information from the wholesalers in a well-defined manner and run a service for clients to access the information. Currently there are two GSAC retailers (SOPAC and UNAVCO). The GSAC software suite includes a Web-based interactive client (GSAC Wizard) to locate data, a command-line client to locate and download data, and a retailer service that uses a macro language to pass commands to a server using the http url. The command-line client uses the retailer service to communicate with the retailer server. SOPAC has also modified its map interface to work with GSAC so that GPS data can be located using a spatial context, and maintains a GSAC Home Page (http://gsac.ucsd.edu). In this abstract, we highlight achievements and lessons learned from our development of the current system, but focus on a possible next generation GSAC that will employ modern IT methodologies, provide a virtual archive with a much richer hierarchy of data products and models derived from GPS and other geodetic data, and make the interface with other geophysical virtual archives more feasible.