Subsidence in California's Central Valley

  • Released Thursday, October 17, 2013
  • Updated Tuesday, September 17, 2019 at 4:56PM
  • ID: 30176

Radar data shows subsidence.

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.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Datasets used in this visualization

Terra (Collected with the ASTER sensor)

Dataset can be found at: http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov

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Advanced Land Observation System (ALOS) L-band frequency (1.27 GHz) radar (Collected with the Phased-Array Synthetic-Aperture Radar (PALSAR) sensor)
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
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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.

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