Automated Near-Field Displacement Estimates from Mobile Laser Scanning - Case Study for the Mw 6.0 August 24, 2014 Napa Earthquake

Quantification of near-field displacements can greatly enhance shallow fault physical investigations. However, to date, established remote sensing techniques such as InSAR and GNSS have failed to recover precise near-field displacements at the scale and resolution required for detailed near-field investigations. To overcome these limitations, we present an automated methodology to extract planar primitives from temporally spaced mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds, and then use common planar features in each data set coupled with a least-squares registration approach that enables a precise estimation of near-field displacement. To validate the utility of this method, we present a case study using MLS to measure afterslip immediately following the Mw 6.0 August 24, 2014 Napa earthquake, and show that the MLS estimates of displacement agree with independent alinement array estimates of afterslip at the sub-centimeter level.