MAPPING ACTIVE FAULT ZONES IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA USING MASTER MULTISPECTRAL IMAGERY DATA

Recent studies of active fault zones using the GPS and InSAR techniques have revealed slip rates that often differ from the slip rates determined from geological observations. This discrepancy is principally due to the different time windows over which surface movements are integrated in both approaches. If surface velocities near faults vary over cycles of several hundreds of years, it becomes important to document the slip history along faults over various time scales as it has been recorded in the Quaternary deposits along the fault. To this endeavor, we have acquired sets of images of the major active faults in Southern California using the MODIS/ASTER airborne simulator (MASTER) instrument. The lines are flown at low altitude above the ground to provide 4 to 5 m spatial resolution in the 50 spectral bands (0.5 to 13 microns) of the instrument. A preliminary set of data was acquired in the summer 2003 over the Garlock and the Blackwater faults in the Mojave. A more extensive campaign carried out in September 2004 covered more than 1000 km of fault lines from the central section of the San Andreas fault to the Salton Sea area and additional faults in the eastern California shear zone. The data are being processed to extract reflectance and emissivity information. Preliminary analysis of the 2003 data confirmed the strong potential of the MASTER thermal bands to identify changes in surface emissivity due to subtle variations of the mineral composition of the deposits. Additional information on the near surface structure of the fault zones can be obtained by combining day and night surface temperature maps, as buried sections of faults are revealed by thermal capacity contrasts between the two sides of a given fault. The paper will present the data set acquired during the 2003 and 2004 campaigns and the status of the raw data processing into geo-referenced emissivity and reflectivity maps of the fault zones.