NASA ARIA Project Maps Deformation of Earth Surface from Nepal Quake

NASA and its partners are contributing important observations and expertise to the ongoing response to the April 25, 2015, magnitude 7.8 Gorkha earthquake in Nepal. The quake was the strongest to occur in that area since the 1934 Nepal-Bihar magnitude 8.0 event and caused significant regional damage and a humanitarian crisis.

Scientists with the Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis project (ARIA), a collaboration between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, analyzed interferometric synthetic aperture radar images from the European Union's Copernicus Sentinel-1A satellite, operated by the European Space Agency and also available from the Alaska Satellite Facility (https://www.asf.alaska.edu), to calculate a map of the deformation of Earth's surface caused by the quake. This false-color map shows the amount of permanent surface movement caused almost entirely by the earthquake, as viewed by the satellite, during a 12-day interval between two Sentinel-1 images acquired on April 17 and April 29, 2015.

In the map, surface displacements are seen as color contours (or "fringes"), where each color cycle represents 8 inches (20 centimeters) of surface motion. The contours show the land around Kathmandu has moved upward by more than 40 inches (1 meter). Areas without the color contours have snow or heavy vegetation that affects the radar measurements. Scientists use these maps to build detailed models of the fault and associated land movements to better understand the impact on future earthquake activity. The background image is from Google Earth. The map contains Copernicus data (2015).

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19535