Animations [Right Click and select Play to watch animations]
The Great Southern California Shakeout
At 10:00 am, Thursday November 13, southern California participated in the largest earthquake preparedness drill in U.S. history. Based on a simulated M 7.8 event on the southern San Andreas fault, the Great Southern California ShakeOut is meant to test the capability of disaster responders, the scientific community, and the general population to deal with a large, devastating earthquake in the region.
The following movie depicts the response of NASA/JPL researchers to such an event. Included in this scenario are components which include modeling using QuakeSim tools and immediate post-earthquake acquisition of InSAR and SAR data by UAVSAR (with future inclusion of continuous acquistion by the DESDynI mission).
This animation features a conceptualization of an InSAR satellite sweeping over southern California. A satellite of this type would record observations of small-scale changes in the Earth's crust, allowing scientists to better understand earthquake processes. (1 MB)
Virtual California visualized with RIVA, all California case [Download Video File]
This is an example of a 1000-year simulation produced by the computer code "Virtual California" visually rendered by the RIVA software. The map is a LandSat image of California, and the black lines represent the major strike-slip earthquake faults. In the model, the faults are divided into 650 segments, each approximately 10 km long, and exactly 15 km deep. After the movie is started, the viewer will see a series of “butterfly" images of various sizes centered on the faults. The butterflies represent the displacement of the ground surface as they would be reconstructed from observations taken by an interferometric radar satellite having a radar wavelength of 5.7 cm. The sizes of the butterflies are related to the sizes of the earthquakes they represent. The color contours can be interpreted as a kind of contour map of the change in ground displacement due to an earthquake, with each color cycle (i.e., red-blue-red) representing 5.7 cm of displacement along the line of sight to the spacecraft. The displacement changes are computed over a time interval of 5 years, and each movie frame represents an advance of 1 year in the ground displacement. The viewer can easily see that an important characteristic of the earthquakes in the simulation is the clustering of the earthquake butterflies in space and time. Clustering of this type is also seen in real earthquakes, and the simulations tell us that it is due to the elastic interactions between fault segments, combined with the nonlinear nature of the friction law governing slip on each fault segment. (60 MB)
This movie shows 500 years of simulation results generated by GeoFEST, a 3D finite element software modeling solid stress and strain. The data were provided by Dr. Jay Parker of JPL. The simulation data were superimposed on top of LandSAT image of Southern California with Northridge fault drawn as a yellow rectangle. The movie starts with a flying-around of the Northridge fault, followed by the deformation resulted from the earthquake. After the initial deformation fades out, it animates the accumulated surface deformation in time for 500 years. Each color fringe in the movie represents 5.6cm vertical displacement, similar to the InSAR C Band fringe. This movie is cleared for web release by JPL Document Review Services with CL#03-1058. (55 Mbytes)
This movie shows 500 years of simulation results generated by GeoFEST, a 3D finite element software modeling solid stress and strain. The data were provided by Dr. Charles Norton of JPL. The simulation data were superimposed on top of LandSAT image of Southern California with Landers faults drawn as a yellow lines. The movie starts with a flying-around of the Landers faults, followed by the deformation resulted from the earthquake. After the initial deformation fades out, it animates the accumulated surface deformation in time for 500 years. Each color fringe in the movie represents 5.6cm vertical displacement, similar to the InSAR C Band fringe. (17 Mbytes)
This animation shows a sequence of images that forecast earthquakes 10 years in advance, beginning with Jan 1, 1980. Thus, the first image is the computation of the change from 1970-1980, forcasting the large events from 1980-1990, etc. In any frame, the blue circles are the earthquakes that will occur in the next ten years, as usual. The green triangles are the large earthquakes that did occur during the computation period. The last frame is the change from 1990-2000, forecasting the large events from 2000 - 2010. The last frame is the image that we have been showing as our forecast (http://quakesim.jpl.nasa.gov/scorecard.html). The frames are a moving 10-year window, advancing 1 month at a time. Notice that a blue circle will show up someplace, then a hotspot will grow beneath it, then the circle will turn into a green triangle when the earthquake actually occurs. (7 MB)
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