COCONet, The Continuously Operating Caribbean GPS Observational Network: Construction Progress and Highlights

The beauty and diversity of the Caribbean region result from geological and atmospheric processes that also pose serious threats to the large population within reach of seismic faults, hurricanes tracks, or sea-level change. The capacity to understand, prepare for, adapt to, and in some cases predict these natural hazards requires Earth observations on both large and small scales. The COCONet project was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with the aim of developing a large-scale geodetic and atmospheric infrastructure in the Caribbean that will form the backbone for a broad range of geoscience and atmospheric investigations and enable research on process-oriented science questions with direct relevance to geohazards. COCONet will consist of 50 new combination GPS and meteorological stations throughout the Caribbean region, and will incorporate data from up to 65 existing GPS stations. COCONet will provide free, high-quality, low-latency, open-format data and data products for researchers, educators, students, and the private sector. These data will be used by local and foreign researchers to study solid earth processes such as plate kinematics and dynamics, and plate boundary interaction and deformation, including earthquake cycle processes. It will also serve atmospheric science objectives by providing more precise estimates of tropospheric water vapor and enabling better forecast of the dynamics of airborne moisture associated with the yearly Caribbean hurricane cycle. COCONet will be installed and maintained by UNAVCO on behalf of the science and other user communities in the United States and abroad, thus leveraging UNAVCO's proven record of efficient and effective network management and its longstanding commitment to collaborative science. Field activities for the COCONet project commenced in March, 2011. To date, field reconnaissance has been conducted at 20 locations for new stations, with formal proposals submitted to host countries and/or in-country partner organizations for ten of these stations. Proposals for installation have been accepted at eight locations, and three complete installations have been completed. In addition, the 65 existing stations have been identified, and work is underway to begin to process and archive the data from these existing stations.