THE EARTHSCOPE PLATE BOUNDARY OBSERVATORY DISTRIBUTED DATA MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

EarthScope is an ambitious, multidisciplinary project funded by the United States National Science Foundation to explore the structure and dynamics of the North American continent. The Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) is EarthScope's geodetic component, and will measure the four-dimensional strain field resulting from active tectonic deformation in the western United States. UNAVCO is installing and will operate the PBO network of more than 1000 continuous GPS, borehole and laser strainmeters, seismometers, and tiltmeters. As of February 2007, 561 of these stations have been installed.

The flow of data from these stations is managed from our Boulder Network Operations Center (NOC), located at UNAVCO Headquarters. Automated systems at the NOC retrieve data from our stations at least daily, monitor the status of the network and alert operators to problems, and pass data on for analysis, archiving, and distribution. Real-time network status can be found at http://pboweb.unavco.org/soh_map.

PBO's analysis centers generate high-quality derived data products from PBO raw data. Central Washington University and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology process raw GPS data to produce initial PBO GPS products including network solutions and station position time series; the Analysis Center Coordinator at MIT combines these products into the official PBO GPS products. Staff of UNAVCO and the University of California, San Diego process data from the PBO borehole and laser strainmeter networks and produce cleaned time series of shear, areal, and linear strain, Earth tides, pore fluid pressure, and other parameters.

The UNAVCO Facility archives and distributes all PBO GPS data products and runs a secondary archive offsite; currently, these centers hold over 2.5 TB of PBO products. The IRIS Data Management Center and Northern California Earthquake Data Center archive and distribute all PBO strainmeter data products, and IRIS archives all PBO seismic data products; more than 160 GB of data products are available from these archives. These same centers also archive other EarthScope seismic and strain data.

The PBO Web site (http://pboweb.unavco.org) provides centralized access to PBO products stored in our distributed archives. GPS products may be accessed from http://pboweb.unavco.org/gps_data and strain data products from http://pboweb.unavco.org/strain_data. In addition, the individual archives provide access to their holdings, both for PBO and other networks, through a variety of discipline-specific tools.

The most exciting development still to come in providing access to EarthScope data products will be the creation of the EarthScope Portal. This system will be based on Web services, operated by the EarthScope components, that provide access to holdings at the EarthScope archives and are linked to a central Web portal. This system will provide a unified system for discovery and access to EarthScope digital data products, and is planned to be operational by October 2008.