Mark Benthien, Chair of the SCIGN Unveiling Event Committee, Associate Director for Outreach, Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC)

Good morning and welcome to the Glendale Civic Auditorium and the SCIGN Unveiling Event. My name is Mark Benthien; I'm the Associate Director for Outreach for the Southern California Earthquake Center.

[logistical information deleted]

Now, it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Thomas Jordan. Last year, Dr. Jordan was appointed as the W.M. Keck Foundation Professor of Earth Science at USC, and is also now the Director Designate of the Southern California Earthquake Center. Dr. Jordan conducts research on various topics in seismology, geodynamics, tectonics, geodesy, and marine geology. Dr. Jordan....

Dr. Thomas Jordan, Director Designate, SCEC

On behalf of the Southern California Earthquake Center, it's my pleasure to welcome all of you to this ceremony dedicating the Southern California Integrated GPS Network. The City of Glendale has played an important role in the SCIGN project, and I'd like to particularly welcome Glendale Councilman David Weaver and other community officials. I'd also like to extend a hearty welcome to the representatives of the federal agencies and private agencies assembled onstage, and to our other distinguished guests. This ceremony marks a very important event in earthquake science -- the establishment of a continuously-monitoring network of geodetic instruments in southern California.

The Earth is an active planet, and southern California is one of its most mobile provinces. As we sit here in this auditorium, the inexorable motions of the great Pacific and North American plates are loading the crustal blocks of southern California like so many springs. When the forces of this squeezing and shearing get too great, the crust snaps along a fault, generating an earthquake. The new technology of the Southern California Integrated GPS Network will provide earthquake scientists for the first time with the ability to watch this progress of strain accumulation and release with enough spatial resolution to understand how each of the crustal blocks is participating in the tectonic motions. The data from SCIGN will allow us to anticipate future earthquakes with more accuracy, as well as to study in much greater detail the fundamental processes of crustal deformation that are the root causes of earthquakes.

The development of SCIGN has been a joint endeavor of many federal, state and private agencies, as well as a host of academic and government research organizations. We will have the opportunity this morning to hear some perspectives from some people from very special agencies, namely the people that paid the bills for the $20 million SCIGN project -- Dr. Ghassem Asrar of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Dr. Ed Stone of the W.M. Keck Foundation, Dr. Margaret Leinen of the National Science Foundation, and Dr. John Filson of the U.S. Geological Survey. SCIGN did not come cheap either in terms of dollars or human effort. The establishment of a continuously-monitoring geodetic network was begun by scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and MIT over a decade ago, but the real impetus for an array as large and as dense as SCIGN was the disastrous 1994 Northridge earthquake. Following Northridge, the SCIGN project was organized under the auspices of the Southern California Earthquake Center, which was able to coordinate this project across many participating academic and government units.

The Southern California Earthquake Center is a unique organization with a threefold mission; namely to gather information about earthquakes in southern California, to integrate this information into a comprehensive understanding of earthquakes, and to communicate this understanding to the general public, as well as to government officials, engineers, emergency managers, and others who must deal with the deleterious effects of earthquakes. One of SCEC's many achievements has been the incorporation of space geodetic data into the methodology of seismic hazard analysis. So SCIGN is a critical facility for future SCEC activities. In particular, it will provide SCEC scientists with a synoptic view of crustal deformation that will be essential to the improvement of seismic hazard analysis.

I'd like to close my brief remarks by emphasizing that this ceremony is only the beginning of the SCIGN project. Earthquakes are exceedingly complex phenomena that operate on timescales from decades to centuries, and the search for an understanding of these earthquakes is not a short-term proposition. The challenge will now be to sustain SCIGN and the long-term research that it has enabled through our activities and those of the agencies that sponsor SCIGN. We at the Earthquake Center certainly pledge our commitment to this task.

Now it's my pleasure to introduce the next speaker, who is Ken Hudnut. He'll give us a brief overview of the SCIGN project. Ken got his PhD from Columbia University in 1989, and was a research scientist at Caltech before joining the U.S. Geological Survey's Pasadena office in 1992. As the Chair of the SCIGN Coordinating Board and the Executive Committee, he's been one of the real driving forces behind the SCIGN project. Please welcome Ken Hudnut.

Dr. Ken Hudnut, SCIGN Chairman, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)

Thank you, Tom. Welcome, everyone.

Today we unveil the Southern California Integrated GPS Network (SCIGN). It's a new type of ground motion monitoring network, that we're using to advance the study of earthquakes. This is the start of an exciting time for all of us, as we anticipate what data come from this new array. SCIGN is a state-of-the-art array that leads the world in technical achievements -- we now fully expect that SCIGN will also lead with future advances in earthquake research as well.

(SCIGN Objectives slide)

When we collectively set out to begin building SCIGN, we had in mind the following major scientific objectives:

• To provide regional coverage for improving estimates of earthquake hazard,
• To identify active blind thrust faults underneath Los Angeles,
• To measure variations in strain -- for example, following the M 7.1 Hector Mine earthquake in October of 1999 -- and,
• To measure permanent motions not detectable by seismographs, and the response of faults to regional strain changes -- for example, was the Hector Mine earthquake triggered by the preceeding Landers sequence?

(Next slide (this begins the animation sequence))

Unlike other instrument networks that record shaking, SCIGN tracks the slow motion of the Earth's plates by using the Global Positioning System (GPS) -- a constellation of satellites, originally designed for military navigation, that are used to determine precise locations on the ground. With SCIGN, the link between the motions of the plates that make up the Earth's crust and the resulting earthquakes is now being observed by an array of GPS stations operating in southern California and Baja California -- one of the world's most seismically active and highly populated areas.

Using SCIGN data to measure deformation of the Earth's crust, which can occur as movement on faults or as slow distortion of the ground, we can determine how strain builds up slowly over time before being released suddenly during earthquakes. The accumulated strain is directly related to earthquake potential, and measurement of it contributes to earthquake hazard assessments that help motivate people to prepare for earthquakes. We have, in southern California, over half of the nation's earthquake risk --- and we are applying GPS technology in new ways to assess this risk.

Many of the scientists who are here today have been active, through the Southern California Earthquake Center, in designing and managing SCIGN. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the U.S. Geological Survey are the main participants in SCIGN. Funding for SCIGN has been primarily provided by NASA, the W.M. Keck Foundation, NSF and the U.S. Geological Survey.

SCIGN has already begun to provide valuable earthquake-related data to scientists, surveyors, utilities, emergency planners, government agencies and commercial photogrammetry and imagery companies, for example. SCIGN data are freely available to anyone over the Internet at www.scign.org. Each month, people retrieve more than 50,000 SCIGN data files, and this number continues to increase. The majority of the hundreds of SCIGN data users are scientists working in universities and government agencies around the world. The other major use of SCIGN data is by land surveyors and engineers in southern California.

You're seeing a time-lapse of what it takes to build a single SCIGN station, so imagine this being done 250 times, to arrive at the point where we are today, marking the completion of the construction of SCIGN. I'd like to invite you all to watch with me now an animation of the construction of the network, beginning in 1994, showing the stations operating at the time of the Northridge earthquake, and progressing up through the latest five years, showing the eventual completion of the network.

(Crustal motion map from SCIGN)

This map shows the resulting crustal motion from these 250 SCIGN stations. These vectors illustrate why SCIGN is ideally suited for improving estimates of earthquake hazard, especially for metropolitan Los Angeles region. Within less than a few years of observations at many of the stations shown, already the crustal motion rates are estimated to within the one millimeter per year observational objective we set out to obtain with SCIGN. With more time and longer observation spans, these data will keep getting better.

(Time series showing co-seismic offset -- from station at Wide Canyon (near the San Andreas fault))

We are simply thrilled when our stations record data like these. Here are data collected from a site near the San Andreas fault, showing the co-seismic jump associated with the distant Hector Mine earthquake. Our hope is that data like these will one day help us to understand better the interaction between faults, that is, how one earthquake can trigger another -- sometimes an even larger event -- on either nearby or distant faults. SCIGN shows us how strain is transferred from one event to the next, with unprecedented precision.

(Strainmeter drawing slide)

Another new earthquake monitoring device being installed is a laser strainmeter along the east side of the Glendale Freeway, made possible with the support of Caltrans and the City of Glendale. Here, a laser beam will travel back and forth inside a 600-meter-long pipe to precisely measure changes in the distance between the endpoints. The laser strainmeter complements the GPS measurements by making observations of strain that are 100 to 1000 times more sensitive. According to SCIGN Coordinating Board member Frank Wyatt, the new strainmeter will be "so sensitive that if we were to take the LA basin and squeeze it over its entire breadth by no thicker than a human hair, the change would be easily detected." Posters in the reception area give details about this extraordinary new instrument that is under construction, and I hope that those of you who take the tour later on will learn all about this laser strainmeter, as well as the SCIGN continuously operating GPS station that you'll be seeing later on.

With SCIGN, new technology is being put to innovative use in doing a much better job of studying the way in which faults are loaded, and then fail catastrophically in earthquakes. SCIGN is advancing our knowledge of earthquakes; such progress may eventually allow scientists to better predict some aspects of earthquake behavior.

(Acknowledgements slide 1)

SCIGN is an extraordinary partnership -- at many levels. A tremendous amount of thought, careful consideration, deliberate planning, and plain hard work went into building SCIGN. As we have now all seen the light at the end of the tunnel coming closer, and we emerge from the tunnel together at last, it is time to express our deep appreciation to everyone who made SCIGN possible.

I'd like to now thank the SCEC Directors, Board and Steering Committee, and of course the SCIGN Coordinating Board members, including those who have served SCIGN in the past...

(Acknowledgements slide 2)

...as well as the SCIGN Advisory Council and Interagency Committee, many of whom are here today.

(Acknowledgements slide 3)

Furthermore, I'd like to especially thank all of those on the SCIGN staff who have worked so hard on a sustained basis, in trying circumstances, to make this network a reality.

Notably, our SCIGN officers have to be singled out because they have both given so much to make SCIGN a success. They are John McRaney, our SCIGN Network Administrator, and of course, John Galetzka, the SCIGN Network Coordinator. We have all relied heavily upon both of them to make things happen, during the SCIGN expansion from 50 to 250 stations over the past five years.

As SCIGN is a prototype for EarthScope, a special effort was recently made to span the plate boundary by establishing a site on the Pacific Plate at Isla Guadelupe, along with our colleagues from CICESE and UNAVCO. I hope you'll all have a chance to view the spectacular poster in the reception area later. I'd also like to acknowledge so many others -- the installation contractors, many of whom are here today as well.

(Acknowledgements slide 4)

Many long hours were spent by many people preparing for today's event, and SCIGN thanks the unveiling event committee members -- especially for the magnificent efforts of the talented people from SCEC and Caltrans on the video, graphics, and animations -- and the USGS publications group on the fact sheet, for their professional assistance.

We would also like to express our great thanks to those of you who are hosts to our SCIGN stations. Many school campuses, parks, and facilities of all kinds are now home to SCIGN stations. Each and every SCIGN station is on land that belongs to someone who kindly granted us permission to be there, and without the support of these individuals we would have only our theories and equations -- no data!

I'd also like to acknowledge the following dignitaries who have joined us today; first, several key individuals from the main SCIGN funding agencies -- Maria Pellegrini from the W.M. Keck Foundation; John Labrecque from NASA Headquarters, Jim Whitcomb from the National Science Foundation Headquarters; and we also have with us John Orcutt, the Director of IGPP at Scripps, Steve Bard from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dario Frommer, who is the 43rd Assembly District representative in the state goverment, will be joining us over lunch, and we have with us now Assistant City Manager Robert McFall from the City of Glendale; and Mary Hamilton and Chris McCarthy representing Glendale Community College.

(Sunset photo of Key's View station -- SCIGN station number 250)

On July 2, 2001, just a few days ago, the 250th SCIGN station was installed, and we are pleased to report that we have now begun to acquire and process data from this newest SCIGN station in Joshua Tree National Park. This site is named Key's View, and with its installation, SCIGN has now officially clicked over the 250 mark. The work will continue beyond this time, of course, but we felt that this is a timely occasion to share with you this major accomplishment of SCIGN.

(End of presentation (back to unveiling event slide))

Now, I'd like to mention the people that will be coming up and speaking over the next few minutes. First, I'd like to introduce the members of the SCIGN Executive Committee: Yehuda Bock, who is the director of the Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Center, Frank Webb, who is the Program Element Manager for SCIGN at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Bill Young, a licensed surveyor who represents the League of California Surveying Organizations, as well as Tom Henyey, director of SCEC, and also Lucy Jones, who is the scientist-in-charge at the USGS office in Pasadena. Thank you.

Frank Webb, SCIGN Project Manager, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Thank you, Ken.

Good morning. As Ken just said, I'm Frank Webb. I'm from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where I am the project manager for the SCIGN project at JPL. JPL is one of the founding organizations of SCIGN with responsibility for the implementation of the network and analysis of data from the network. In addition, JPL shares, with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the operation, management, and development responsibilities for the SCIGN program. Also, scientists from JPL participate actively and contribute to the scientific discoveries that are being uncovered as a result of data from the network. It is safe to say that the success of our project would not have been possible without the support of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise and the long-term investments that they have made in space geodesy, GPS technology, and earth science research.

At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce to you the associate administrator for Earth Sciences at NASA, Dr. Ghassem Asrar.

Dr. Ghassem Asrar, Associate Administrator for Earth Science, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Thank you, Frank; good morning.

It is, indeed, my great pleasure to stand in front of you and represent the NASA team, and more importantly, to join you in celebrating this important new step toward developing our ability to better understand earthquake risk. I join with our partners, the W.M. Keck Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Geological Survey in congratulating the hundreds of scientists across the nation who worked under the auspices of the Southern California Earthquake Center to make the SCIGN array a reality. Southern California is blessed with a number of world-class institutions dedicated to earthquake research. Now, with the completion of the SCIGN array, southern California becomes the premier natural laboratory for earthquake research.

The NASA Earth Science Enterprise is dedicated to understanding how the Earth is changing and what the consequences of those changes are for life on Earth. NASA's investment in the geodetic technologies such as the precision Global Positioning System, radar interferometry, very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), and satellite laser ranging are premier examples of bringing space-age technologies to study the development of earthquake potential at the boundary between two of the Earth's great tectonic plates, the Pacific and the North American plates. The societal impact of earthquake disasters is very well understood and it is mounting as this region of our country continues to develop. Our sister agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), estimates that earthquakes in California alone cost the U.S. economy nearly $3.3 Billion dollars per year; some believe that is a conservative estimate. The FEMA estimates cannot begin to convey the cost in human lives or the cost of broken dreams which inevitably result when earthquakes strike without warning.

The need for the SCIGN array was amplified as a result of the Northridge earthquake on January 17, 1994. Northridge resulted in 57 deaths and 1500 serious injuries, over 24,000 dwellings vacated, and total economic cost estimates approaching $50 billion. The impact of this disaster, which was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, convinced NASA that it was time to apply its years of research and development in space geodesy to the understanding and reduction of earthquake risk. SCIGN is designed to directly address earthquake risk in this tectonically-complex region, where active deformation along major fault systems challenges one of the largest economies of our nation. NASA's hope is that space-age geodetic tools such as precision GPS, VLBI, and space-based laser ranging coupled with new technologies that are under development by NASA, such as Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, can be brought together with computer models that could run on supercomputing capabilities and we'll ultimately understand the mechanics of earthquakes in the same way that we have managed to achieve the understanding associated with atmospheric natural hazards, such as storms and hurricanes. So similarly, our near-term goal at NASA is to better understand the mechanics and the physics associated with the tectonic forces and to understand the risk associated with these events. And in the long term, we believe and we hope that we can get to the state of understanding that we could ultimately forecast these events.

I would be remiss not to mention the strong contributions of our partnership with industry in this endeavor. Clearly, we are especially proud of the significant investment that the government has made, over the years, in the development of the hardware and software and the GPS technology, but all of this was brought together through partnership between government and industry, and most of the GPS sensors that are utilized in these 250 locations were built by the private industry. So, above and beyond the scientific and the societal benefit of this partnership, clearly there is an industrial dimension to it that has made the U.S. industry to be a leader, globally, in this area.

Finally, I would like to note that the SCIGN array is just the beginning of the NASA, National Science Foundation and USGS partnership in this very high priority research area. The U.S. earth science community, the institutions that are involved in the SCIGN program, as well as other institutions across the country have come together and identified a major challenging program for our nation to embark on, which is now known as EarthScope. The intent of EarthScope is to extend the coverage of geodetic sensors for most of the earthquake-prone regions of western North America, from Alaska to southern Mexico. Of course, we at NASA support this effort, and we are beginning to invest in the development of the next generation of technologies that could significantly contribute to this initiative, namely in the form of interferometric synthetic aperture radars, as well as a wide variety of space-borne, airborne and ground-based sensor that will help us continue to improve our ability to understand the mechanics and the physics associated with these events and be in a position to respond in a timely fashion to risks associated with earthquakes and earthquake-related disasters.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to once again congratulate the whole team for your success in completing this very challenging project. We belive this is the beginning of a fruitful and long-term relationship between federal agencies, local government organizations, and the research institutions, both in California as well as across the nation. This is truly a remarkable accomplishment, the first time we've seen such a wide spectrum of institutions and organizations coming together to put their resources and talents toward one of the highest-priority areas of research for our nation. Thank you very much.

Dr. Tom Henyey, Director, SCEC

I'm Tom Henyey of the Southern California Earthquake Center.

The scientific community first began discussing the desirability of installating a permanent GPS network in southern California in the late 1980s. The possibility of using GPS to study strain build-up and release along active faults was beginning to excite the geophysical community. However, as in all new techniques, there were skeptics. Moreover, instruments were expensive and their long-term reliability untested. Nevertheless, a number of groups pressed forward; people who are here today.

Then along came the 1992 Landers and 1994 Northridge earthquakes and the implications for future earthquake hazards in southern California. I think it's safe to say that these events launched what ultimately became SCIGN, as we heard earlier. And just as importantly, everyone realized that if we were to do things right, it had to be a community effort, and turned to the Southern California Earthquake Center, which had already begun to catalyze earthquake-science research here in southern California. As SCEC director at that time, I remember how the various groups began pulling together and to prepare proposals to NSF, NASA and the USGS; things were beginning to look up.

Then one day I got a call from Dr. Sandra Glass, then of the W.M. Keck Foundation, who wanted to come by and talk to me about GPS -- well, need I say more? The Foundation's work is well-known to all of us here today. The meeting resulted in a request by the Keck Foundation to SCEC, through the University of Southern California, for a proposal to build a first-rate permanent GPS network in southern California with a principal focus on the greater Los Angeles basin and its seismic hazard. SCEC and SCIGN received a grant of $5.6 million from the W.M. Keck Foundation and here today is one of the persons who undoubtedly had a role in that decision. It's a pleasure for me to introduce Dr. Ed Stone, Director Emeritus at JPL, professor of physics at Caltech, and Chair of the W.M. Keck Foundation Science, Engineering and Liberal Arts Grants Program Committee.

Dr. Edward C. Stone, Chairman of the Science, Engineering, And Liberal Arts Grant Program Committee, W.M. Keck Foundation

Thank you, Tom; I am certainly very pleased to be here today on behalf of the W.M. Keck Foundation. The completion of the Southern California Integrated GPS Network is an important step in observing the deformation of the Earth's crust on which the cities of southern California are built.

Being located in Los Angeles, the Keck Foundation is keenly interested in scientific and engineering activities that can benefit this region. That was certainly one important attribute when the GPS Network was proposed five years ago, because a better understanding of earthquakes is certainly of great interest and importance to everyone in southern California.

We live on the boundary between two plates of crust that are sliding past each other at several inches per year on the average. As these two plates collide, their edges are slowly deformed, with increasing amounts of energy stored as the crust wrinkles and folds.

The GPS Network provides a new capability to measure the amount of distortion of the crust before earthquakes occur. This is now possible with unprecedented precision due in part to technology developed just miles from here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that is operated by Caltech for NASA. With this technology, signals from the global positioning satellite system are used to measure changes as small as one millimeter -- 1/25 of an inch -- over distances that are tens of miles apart.

This is a fundamentally new kind of information, so of course there are no guarantees as to what will be learned. So that, in this sense, this is a high-risk undertaking, but one with the potential of a high return. This was a second important attribute of the proposed network.

A third important attribute was the opportunity to catalyze a partnership among top institutions and outstanding researchers to accomplish something that could not have been as effectively pursued individually. This partnership brought together scientists and engineers from the academic, public and private sectors. It also brought together private funding from the Keck Foundation and the University of Southern California, and public funding from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

This unveiling today indicates that the GPS Network has indeed been a catalyst, one that has fostered stronger institutional and individual relationships that should benefit future collaborative endeavors.

Opening the way to future opportunities for science and engineering was, in fact, a fourth important attribute of the proposal. Thus, five years ago it appeared that the proposed GPS Network could be the first, not the last, step in a new direction for understanding earthquakes. As such it would serve as a pathfinder, and its success would almost certainly encourage even larger steps. You already just heard about EarthScope, a much larger step that is now being planned, and one of its four key components is an array of 1000 GPS sensors covering the entire West Coast of the North American continent.

So, in today's unveiling of the Southern California Integrated GPS Network, we are celebrating a new capability having four key attributes:

• It promises to be of importance to everyone living in southern California,
• It was high risk but offers the possibility of high payoff,
• It catalyzed new partnerships among top researchers, and
• It opened up a new direction for future science and engineering.

Dr. Yehuda Bock, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Universiy of California at San Diego (UCSD), Member of the SCIGN Executive Committee

Thank you, Dr. Stone.

Hello, my name is Yehuda Bock; it's a real pleasure for me to be here today and have an opportunity to talk to all of you.

I'm a research geodesist at UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I'm also director of the Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Center (SOPAC), which is located at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics in La Jolla. Twelve years ago, Scripps and JPL scientists partnered to found the Permanent GPS Geodetic Array (PGGA), the first continuous GPS array in the world for monitoring regional deformation, and the predecessor of SCIGN. With the encouragement and support of Scripps and IGPP, we developed a world-class archive of continuous GPS data, innovative analysis tools including the first operational GPS orbit product, the SCIGN deeply-anchored monument, and laser strainmeter technology three times more accurate than GPS. Last year, we reached a milestone when a wide variety of users collected over one million individual SCIGN data files from SOPAC.

As an academic, I look to the National Science Foundation as a primary source of research funds, and NSF has been instrumental in funding SCIGN from its early days. So it is my pleasure and honor to introduce Dr. Margaret Leinen.

Dr. Leinen was appointed the Assistant Director for Geosciences at NSF in January of last year. She is also responsible for coordinating environmental science, engineering, and education programs within NSF, and for environmental collaborations between NSF and other Federal agencies. Dr. Leinen serves as the chair of the Subcommittee on Global Change that coordinates global change science among Federal agencies. She came to NSF from the University of Rhode Island where she was Dean of the Graduate School of Oceanography and Vice Provost for Marine and Environmental Programs. Dr. Leinen is a well-known researcher in paleo-oceanography and paleoclimatology, and is past president of the Oceanography Society. Thank you, Dr. Leinen, for taking the time to join us in our celebration of SCIGN.

Dr. Margaret Leinen, Assistant Director for Geosciences, National Science Foundation (NSF)

Thanks, Yehuda.

I'm delighted to be with you today, and with my partner federal agencies and with the W.M. Keck Foundation to congratulate the SCIGN group on the 250th installation, but even more important on the completion of this incredible project. I'd like to try to put into perspective some of the other things that are going on in science.

There is a revolution in our ability to observe the Earth and to understand this dynamic Earth that we live on, and that revolution is being made possible by the Internet, and by information technology, and SCIGN is the first real example of the power of networking a whole array of instruments together to create a measuring device -- an instrument, a sensor -- that is more than the sum of its parts. It also is an example of the use of and the transfer of technologies developed for other purposes for scientific use. The Global Positioning System, or GPS, has emerged as a fundamental and revolutionary technology for earth sciences. This system was originally developed by the military, of course, for positioning and for navigation with meter-level accuracy. Using the innovation and creativity of the scientific community, the techniques developed at JPL, it's now being used for millimeter-scale accuracy of understanding the difference in position of the crust. These changes in position to a fraction of a millimeter are now being used -- obviously, as you've heard -- to be able to understand the stress accumulating along the great faults in southern California; the strain that takes place across those faults when they actually move. It can also be used to look at the deformation on volcanoes and their movement and their deformation as magma comes up into the volcano. And finally, in larger arrays, to look at the deformation of the Earth's crust as a whole.

Southern California has been a very important factor for the implementation and refinement of GPS technology for earth sciences, and SCIGN is at the very forefront. Here we are at really the epicenter or ground zero for the most tectonically-active area of the United States and here it is that continuous GPS technology has been developed, improved, and applied to this very important problem. It's also been implemented as a result of the discoveries and the work here across other parts of the U.S. and around the world, including Japan. The first large earthquake measured by continuous GPS was in southern California -- the 1992 Landers earthquake in the Mojave desert. Later the 1994 Northridge earthquake and 1999 Hector Mine earthquake were also captured with continuous GPS array technology, each time with better spatial coverage and higher temporal resolution. SCIGN stations were even able to measure the seismic wave that propagated through the crust after the Hector Mine earthquake.

Not only has SCIGN demonstrated capabilities for continuous GPS, but it has also led the community in developing completely open data policies for the use of this data. SCIGN data are downloaded once a day and immediately made available over the Internet to anyone -- not only to the institutions that have put together this remarkable partnership, but to scientists at every institution, to school children around the country. This open data policy is a fundamental characteristic of SCIGN and a very important one as a model for how the investments that are made by taxpayers through their agencies for the benefit of all of us must be used.

SCIGN has also led the development of long-term data archives, data assimilation, data dissemination to others, and data visualization for earth sciences. It's been chosen to develop the user interface for a seamless GPS data archive for the University Navstar Consortium.

SCIGN has been an example of how to put together an interagency collaboration, like this one, including NASA's JPL, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the USGS. It's worked effectively under the umbrella of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC). SCEC was started as an NSF Science and Technology Center with the dream that centers like this would serve to catalyze scientists to create new ideas, new paradigms, for the study of systems, and SCEC has certainly been an incredible example of that and an incredible success.

You've heard several times about this new capability that the agencies are interested in developing, EarthScope. Obviously, the metaphor is a microscope; a microscope focused on the Earth that allows us to understand this dynamic planet in new ways. Picture first an array of seismometers across the entire country, looking with greater resolution that we've ever been able to at the structure of the country, the structure of the crust under the country, the structure of the faults. Then focus in on the West Coast, on this very active area of deformation and picture the extension of the SCIGN array across the entire West Coast of the U.S., to be able to look at deformation, movement and strain on all of the faults across this very active area. Then consider an interferometric synthetic aperature radar, described to you by Dr. Asrar, in space complementing the time-series view that comes from the continuous GPS recorders with the very intense spatial resolution that comes from a satellite. And finally, picture an observatory drilled into the San Andreas fault, measuring the parameters of the fault, and looking at what goes on in that fault with time, each of these pieces mutually reinforcing and adding to the capabilities of the others, and that's EarthScope. And now you can understand why all of the agencies are so excited about this concept, and so excited that SCIGN has been a prototype for the development of the capabilities of such a system, and for the development of the partnerships that are necessary to put together an ambitious agenda like that.

And so for all of these reasons -- the leadership in the scientific capability, the leadership in developing partnerships, the leadership in conceiving important and exciting new capabilities, the leadership in bringing this partnership to California, and to the people of California, for the benefit of us all -- NSF congratulates the SCIGN group and the SCIGN partners. Thank you very much.

Dr. Lucy Jones, Scientist-in-Charge, USGS Pasadena

Thank you Dr. Leinen.

Good morning, I'm Lucy Jones; I'm the Scientist-in-Charge for southern California with the U. S. Geological Survey. The USGS is the federal agency charged with earthquake monitoring and applied science research for earthquake hazard reduction for the United States. In southern California we accomplish this through our office on the campus of Caltech in Pasadena, as well as partnerships with the many excellent academic institutions of the region. With Caltech, we operate another network, TriNet, where we record the ground motions, earthquake locations and magnitudes. In that context, we have the responsibility for responding with emergency responders after events and communicating with the public, which is probably where you've been most likely to see us. Scientists in our office have been part of the SCIGN project from the beginning and because of our earthquake response obligations within SCIGN, we have the obligation for rapid post-earthquake response, as well as for the field operations.

It's my privilege to introduce the national coordinator for the Earthquake Hazards Program in the USGS, Dr. John Filson. He leads the nation's efforts in earth science research directed toward earthquake hazard reduction. He's been leading the program for over a decade and has led us through times of great technological innovations, including the development of SCIGN, TriNet, and the Advanced National Seismic System. So please welcome Dr. Filson.

Dr. John Filson, national program coordinator, Earthquake Hazards Office, USGS

Thank you, Lucy.

It's my pleasure and honor to be here to represent the Geological Survey at this ceremony recognizing the completion of the Southern California Integrated GPS Network. First of all, I would like to convey the congratulations to SCIGN from the director of the Geological Survey, Dr. Charles Groat. He regrets that he's not here today; he had planned to be here, but the pleasure of his company was requested at another venue by the Secretary of the Interior. To put the USGS involvement in context -- as Lucy introduced me -- essentially, we do three things as part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reductions Program. We study with our academic colleagues the causes and effects of earthquakes. We also do earthquake hazard assessments or evaluations, both on a national and regional scale. These assessments are not predictions of earthquakes, but they're predictions of how severely we expect the ground to shake at any location in the country over various exposure times, which are usually measured in decades. And finally, we do earthquake montioring and notification for the networks that we operate and the networks that we operate cooperatively with various partners, and we try to provide rapid and accurate information on location, magnitude, and the distribution and severity of ground shaking just after an earthquake.

We've heard and we all know that the southern California area has been subjected and will continue to experience significant earthquakes -- the most recent of these with significant damage and economic loss was the Northridge earthquake. We've heard that these earthquakes are caused by the collision of the North American plate and the Pacific plate, the collision zone taking place right under southern California. In order to understand the physics and structure of the plate boundary, we need to make measurements both in the seismic domain and in the geodetic domain. Networks of seismometers are needed to determine the location and magnitude and map the more active faults as they occur across the region. Networks of geodetic measurement devices, such as SCIGN, are needed to measure the minute but steady build-up of strain both in location and time across the region. To the chagrin of my scientific colleagues, I use the analogy that seismic networks take the pulse of the Earth, and geodetic networks measure its blood pressure.

Despite the unfortunate occurence of the Northridge earthquake, it did stimluate two very aggressive instrumentation efforts in southern California. Working with partners both at the state and federal level, we have developed a rather extensive network of seismometers called the TriNet project. As we're here celebrating today, similar partnerships have been put together to complete this very dense network of 250 geodetic GPS receivers that's known as SCIGN. Between these two efforts, southern California is one of the best-wired places in the country to measure the effects of and study earthquakes. What we need to do is to extend the effort in southern California to other parts of the country that are subject to high and moderate earthquake risk. This can be done under the EarthScope initiative and the initiative of the Advanced National Seismic System. The SCIGN and TriNet efforts are also unique not only in their extent, but they're unique in that they've brought together various partners at the state and local level to fund their realization. We're thankful to the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Keck Foundation for working with the Geological Survey in supporting this project. We also express our gratitude to other partners at the state and local level who have worked to bring it about. I want to thank, in particular, the scientists and technicians, the project managers, from multiple institutions and agencies who have worked to make SCIGN possible. In particular, we recognize the Southern California Earthquake Center for serving the project management function in the SCIGN effort.

For all involved, their hard work, their cooperation, and their imagination in completing the SCIGN effort cannot be overstated. They should all be very proud of their efforts, as we are proud of them. My agency is honored to be represented here to celebrate the completion of the SCIGN project. The Geological Survey has provided partial support for the development of the SCIGN project, and we are committed to sustaining this support in the operation of SCIGN in the future. And what a bright future it is; we are confident that we'll make major discoveries of how the Earth works in earthquake-prone areas. We are confident that we'll have extensive applications in the engineering and surveying communities. And ultimately, we are confident it will help to lower the risk to society in the southern California area from the earthquake threat. We look forward to working with interested parties in realizing this future. Thank you very much.

Bill Young, League of California Surveying Organizations, Member of the SCIGN Executive Committee

Thank you, Dr. Filson. My name is Bill Young; I'm with the League of California Surveying Organizations. The League is made up primarily of county surveyors, city surveyors, and special districts, and they have a special interest in SCIGN. Many of those people are in the audience, along with some engineering firms that have a special interest in SCIGN. For every SCIGN station that's put in the ground becomes a survey monument, and we use it to do our surveying with, and it has an accuracy that we just couldn't believe until we started using the stations. I might say we've been using the stations from day one, when the first SCIGN stations went in, we used them to do surveying with. The people that make up the League have agreed to supply the manpower to service all of the 250 SCIGN sites, so that we can keep them running indefinitely, and indeed, we plan on those stations running indefinitely. With that, I would like to introduce the other people who are other users of SCIGN data. I'll introduce them all, and then they'll talk individually. The first is Marti Ikehara. Marti is with the National Geodetic Survey and she is the representative here in California, and her office is in Sacramento. The next is Cecilia Whitaker. Cecilia is with the Metropolitan Water District and her office is here in southern California. And finally, Don Donofrio, who is with the California Spatial Reference Center.

Marti Ikehara, National Geodetic Survey (NGS)

Thank you, Bill. It is an honor to be invited to speak here today. The National Geodetic Survey, which is part of NOAA, has been supportive of the SCIGN concept from the beginning. This network and others have become the backbone of the California Spatial Reference System, the legal basis for coordinates determined by geodetic surveying. Precise coordinates are the foundation of statewide and nationwide infrastructure, such as freeways and energy and water transmission facilities. They are also needed for the mapping and bathymetry required for one of the responsibilities of NGS, the national shoreline, which includes locating new piers and docks in addition to natural changes. As traditional monumentation is increasingly susceptible to destruction by development and construction, SCIGN's CORS [Continuously Operating Reference Stations] have proven to be extremely accurate, reliable, and, so far, indestructible. The installation of these CORS, which are a critical component of NGS, dramatically improves precise measurement capability and the science of geodesy. NGS is pleased to be in partnership with the SCIGN consortium. The next speaker is Cecilia Whitaker.

Cecilia Whitaker, Metropolitan Water District (MWD)

Good morning, I'm Cecilia Whitaker of the Metropolitan Water District, and I'm a SCIGN data junkie. Actually, I'm a geodetic engineer; I'm resposibile for monitoring the geodetic displacements of our dams and reservoirs as part of MWD's Safety of Dams surveillance program.

MWD provides about 60% of the drinking water used by the nearly 17 million people in southern California through a system of over a thousand miles of canals and pipelines, through numerous reservoirs, filtration plants, hydroelectric plants, and control structures. We measure over 30 of these facilities twice a year, monthly or weekly, depending; this is to monitor the structural integrity and to ensure public safety. We have 20 of these facilities which are under the jurisdiction of the State of California Department of Water Resources, Division of Safety of Dams, Division 3. We use the SCIGN network on 95% of these monitoring projects and all of our control network projects. We use the SCIGN network for regional control networks, for large-scale surveys, for construction projects, for local control and monitoring, and most recently as a real-time GPS monitoring and alarm network at our new large reservoir in Hemet. Our future plans include partnering with SCIGN to use their data to assist us in rapid emergency assessment of our facilities after seismic events.

Use of the SCIGN network has reduced our labor cost with regard to field survey by 50%. This was important to us due to the recent retirements of many of our field personnel who were not to be replaced. Through the use of the SCIGN network, we were able to handle a doubling of our workload due to this new reservoir with a decreased level of personnel and at the same time were able to improve our accuracy and precision of our measurements. The SCIGN network is such a valuable resource and tool for MWD that we have worked with SCIGN to install and maintain 20 of these stations on our important facilities. Also, because the SCIGN network is such a valuable resource and tool, myself and my supervisor have devoted personal time to instruct other members of the land-surveying community in southern California in the use of this resource. Thank you for your time.

Don Donofrio, California Spatial Reference Center (CSRC)

Good morning, I'm Don Donofrio of the California Spatial Reference Center whose mission is to provide an accurate, uniform -- and for California, most importantly -- an up-to-date geodetic network for the state of California. "Up-to-date" in this case indicates crustal motion which heretofore surveyors, for the most part, did not have to take into account, and now they do. We work very closely, as Marti mentioned, with the National Geodetic Survey -- it is the organization that publishes much of the results that we get from CSRC. But more importantly, the SCIGN network is the backbone for CSRC. The CSRC for a number of us here in California has been kind of a labor of love to get the process off the ground, and I don't think we could do it without the SCIGN network in place. We take full advantage of that and actually have plans to put a few additional stations in California in areas that are not traditionally of interest to the seismic community -- to wit, the subsidence areas of the Central Valley, Santa Clara Valley, and a few other places. In the Central Valley, we have an area that subsided 27 feet from the time NGS first started its levelling in the 20's, until it did its last levelling in the area in the 1970's, and quite frankly, we have no idea what's happened since then, so we do have some rather serious vertical problems as well. We use the SCIGN network as the basis for a reobservation of the survey monuments in the vicinity of the Hector Mine earthquake. We've done that after every major earthquake in California since 1990, but this was the first earthquake that the California Spatial Reference Center was actually involved in, did the processing, the adjustment, and effectively fed the numbers to the National Geodetic Survey for them to publish. We look forward to continued cooperation with the SCIGN network as I mentioned -- we do work closely, in addition, with the BARD group in Northern California and less so with the BARGEN groups and the PANGA groups who provide similar kinds of services, but very little of it here in California. So, we appreciate our relationship with the SCIGN group; we certainly appreciate your financial support -- the CSRC couldn't function without it -- and we hope it continues. Thank you very much.

Ken Hudnut introduces:

It's now my priviledge to introduce Doug Failing, chief deputy of Caltrans District 7. I also would like to make special mention and thanks to Caltrans for their assistance in preparing for today's event, and especially for the permission to install the laser strainmeter along the Glendale Freeway.

Doug Failing, Chief Deputy, California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) District 7

Thank you, Ken. Good afternoon, distinguished guests, members of the media. It's a great pleasure for me to be here today in beautiful Glendale. On behalf of the California Department of Transportation, I would like to say that it's an honor for me to take this opportunity to salute the Southern California Integrated GPS Network (SCIGN), for their outstanding work in the area of earthquake and ground motion research.

I live here, I work here, I raise my family here, and it's well that I remember seven-and-a-half years ago when the deadly Northridge earthquake struck. As devastating as it was, there was good news to report, and that was due, in a large part, to many of you that are here today. Because of SCIGN's critical work, and that of the Universities of San Diego and Berkeley, in the areas of research and the support of the sponsors in the vital funding that's necessary to allow that work to go forward and develop new materials and new techniques, I'm pleased to be able to say that not one major freeway structure collapsed during the Northridge earthquake that had undergone seismic retrofit at that time. The structural integrity was not compromised on any of the 114 freeway structures that had undergone seismic retrofit at that particular point in time. It's the work of the scientific community and their sponsors that validates how important that is for each of us, and it's quite an achievement, when one considers the heights and the weights that are placed in motion on the tops of columns for each of those freeway structures here in southern California, that brought all of our bridges up to current design codes at that time. In all, a total of 671 structures were retrofitted to current design standards here in southern California -- Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Not only does the California Department of Transportation depend on the work of SCIGN, but every resident living here in southern California, in these earthquake-prone areas, are endebted to the efforts made by these scientists and their sponsors, who are doing everything necessary to provide us all with a safer and better environment. Congratulations, SCIGN, on your latest achievement. The California Department of Transportation welcomes the opportunity to continue forward in partnership in the years ahead. Thank you.

Ken Hudnut introduces:

Thank you, Doug. I'm very pleased that today Ed Bortugno can join us. Ed is a senior geologist in the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services. When we have large earthquakes, we work with these people. Recently, we had a workshop on emergency response held at Caltech, and we are just starting to form partnerships with the emergency responders, hoping to work with them in advance of future earthquakes and make sure that they get the information from SCIGN rapidly after future earthquakes. So, Ed....

Ed Bortugno, Senior Geologist, California Governor's Office of Emergency Services (OES)

Thank you very much, Ken. I'd like to express Dallas Jones' -- our director -- his sorrow in not being able to be here today; he is intimately involved in a lot of things that you might not imagine the director of the Governor's Office of Emergency Services even thinks about these days. Certainly, you all know that our main mission, really, and role is to respond to disasters in California, be they earthquakes, fire, flood, landslides, or even technological disasters. But one of the things we've realized very plainly, very clearly, over the years -- in particular, in the 1990s, in which we had just about a disaster a year, sometimes two -- is that we are good at responding to disasters, but that's not enough. We need to learn to mitigate these disasters and really put that into place, and it's research such as the research that's going on with the SCIGN project that really is a key element in this research for us in doing hazard mitigation in California. We need to understand what the Earth is doing, not only during large earthquakes, but prior to large earthquakes. Some of the real-time aspects involved with SCIGN I think are very intriguing to the Office of Emergency Services and we eagerly await being more involved in that process. For instance, some of the monitors that are going to tell us what dams and freeway structures are doing prior to and during an earthquake really are going to help us a lot in how we move ourselves around in southern California -- where our priorities are right after an earthquake -- and I think that's an element that we really want to participate in very closely.

The Office of Emergency Services, through our director, Dallas Jones, has been working with the Governor's office and the legislature to expand the TriNet project throughout the entire state. The California Integrated Seismic Network is currently still residing in the budget -- we don't have a final budget just yet -- but our hope is that we will be funded through the next five years to build this network not only in southern California -- to operate it -- but to build it and operate it in perpetuity throughout the rest of the state. This kind of real-time information about earthquakes and about their effects is something that we have come to rely on and we really have adjusted how we operate and will continue to do that. So again, I'd like to congratulate the member agencies and funders of SCIGN. The Office of Emergency Services eagerly awaits working with you in the future. Thank you.

Ken Hudnut:

SCIGN has involved the efforts of hundreds of people and the contributions of many organizations and agencies. What is about to be unveiled is a tribute to the accomplishments to date, and a symbol of the capability that now exists for understanding earthquakes. So now, we're pleased to present the operational Southern California Integrated GPS Network.

{unveiling}

Well, I'd just like to make a final thanks to all the sponsors of SCIGN and to all of you for coming today; hope you'll enjoy the reception. Just for a few more words, here, Mark Benthien is going to address you for a moment. I'd like to just say a special thanks to Mark for all of his efforts in organizing today's event.