UNAVCO

UNAVCO is a member-governed university consortium, an organization that is uniquely positioned to advance and support geodesy community science goals. In addition to over 90 US academic members, UNAVCO supports more than 65 organizations at home and abroad as associate members that share UNAVCO's mission and benefit from its programs and services. Before incorporation in 2001, UNAVCO existed under different organizational umbrellas for nearly two decades as the University Navstar Consortium, then primarily serving geophysicists and geodesists who study tectonic deformation using high-precision GPS technology.

Over the last decade, UNAVCO's scope has expanded significantly, serving new science communities - including those who focus on the deformation of ice, the Earth's response to ground water, sea level, and other aspects of the hydrosphere, and renewed interest in imaging the structure of the atmosphere. At the same time, the toolbox available to the science community and supported by UNAVCO has expanded to include many new geodetic tools: advancing GPS towards mm-level global GPS geodesy and to streaming high rate observations; borehole strain meters and seismometers, expanded geodetic imaging using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) for Airborne Laser Swath Mapping, InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar), and Terrestrial Laser Scanning, web services and cyberinfrastructure. At the same time, GPS is finding applications in a frequency range that used to be the sole provenance of seismology, as GPS moves from one solution per day to one solution per second, with high precision. These changes are part of a conscious strategy to meet the future needs of the science community.

The UNAVCO Facility located in Boulder, Colorado provides science support through community coordination, field engineering, data services, technology innovation, and instrument testing, acquisition, and deployment. Further, it supports state-of-the-art global geodetic infrastructure that is developed and operated through international collaborations. EarthScope, a set of integrated geophysical observatories, supports investigation of the entire temporal spectrum of Earth deformation processes. In particular, the Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) including GeoEarthScope provides unprecedented geodetic imaging of plate boundary deformation. Together, the UNAVCO Facility and PBO are committed to enabling efficient testing, adoption, and implementation of rapidly evolving geodetic technologies needed to support cutting edge geodynamics research.

Our long-term success depends on development of a forward-looking, diversified workforce that draws on and cultivates talent across the demographic spectrum of gender and ethnicity, across international boundaries, and across scientific disciplines. The UNAVCO community further relies on the Education and Outreach program to inform the public interest and to support the development of partnerships, collaborations, curricula, and student opportunities.

Most of these activities, staff, and facilities are centered in Boulder, Colorado. Plate Boundary Observatory maintains regional offices in San Clemente, California and Anchorage, Alaska. UNAVCO field engineering staff are often deployed on assignments around the world.

Core sponsorship for UNAVCO is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).