High-Resolution LiDAR Topography of the Plate-Boundary Faults in Northern California
Abstract
GeoEarthScope acquired more than 1500 square km of airborne LiDAR data in northern California, providing high-resolution topographic data of most of the major strike-slip faults in the region. The coverage includes the San Andreas Fault from its northern end near Shelter Cove to near Parkfield, as well as the Rodgers Creek, Maacama, Calaveras, Green Valley, Paicines, and San Gregorio Faults. The Hayward fault was added with funding provided by the US Geological Survey, the City of Berkeley, and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Data coverage is typically one kilometer in width, centered on the fault. In areas of particular fault complexity the swath width was increased to two kilometers, and in selected areas swath width is as wide as five kilometers. A five-km-wide swath was flown perpendicular to the plate boundary immediately south of Cape Mendocino to capture previously unidentified faults and to understand off-fault deformation associated with the transition zone between the transform margin and the Cascadia subduction zone. The data were collected in conjunction with an intensive GPS campaign designed to improve absolute data accuracy and provide quality control. Data processing to classify the LiDAR point data by return type allows users to filter out vegetation and produce high-resolution DEMs of the ground surface beneath forested regions, revealing geomorphic features along and adjacent to the faults. These data will allow more accurate mapping of fault traces in regions where the vegetation canopy has hampered this effort in the past. In addition, the data provide the opportunity to locate potential sites for detailed paleoseismic studies aimed at providing slip rates and event chronologies. The GeoEarthScope LiDAR data will be made available via an interactive data distribution and processing workflow currently under development.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2007
- Bibcode:
- 2007AGUFM.G43D..06P
- Keywords:
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- 1200 GEODESY AND GRAVITY;
- 7230 Seismicity and tectonics (1207;
- 1217;
- 1240;
- 1242);
- 8036 Paleoseismology (7221);
- 8150 Plate boundary: general (3040);
- 8175 Tectonics and landscape evolution