Subsidence in California's Central Valley
This animation shows, in exaggerated terms, how the surface of the southern Central Valley of California deformed from the period 2007 to 2011. Interferometric data from the Japanese ALOS PALSAR imaging radar was used to measure the deformation, shown in color overlaid on an ASTER image. The large subsidence "bowl" that developed over this time period was caused by withdrawal of groundwater, causing subsurface layers to compact. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR, can be used to monitor subsidence in order to prevent groundwater overdraft and irreversible compaction of aquifers. ALOS PALSAR data is copyright JAXA/METI and was provided by the GEO Supersites and the U.S. Government Research Consortium datapool at the Alaska Satellite Facility.
Radar data shows subsidence.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Visualizer
- Vincent Realmuto (NASA/JPL CalTech)
Release date
This page was originally published on Thursday, October 17, 2013.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 12:23 AM EST.
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
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[Terra: ASTER]
ID: 113This dataset can be found at: http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov
See all pages that use this dataset -
L-band frequency (1.27 GHz) radar [Advanced Land Observation System (ALOS): Phased-Array Synthetic-Aperture Radar (PALSAR)]
ID: 721
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.