UNAVCO

UNAVCO, Inc.

Founded	1984 (1984)
Focus	Geodesy, Data acquisition, Scientific data archiving
Location	Boulder, Colorado
Coordinates	40°03′40″N 105°12′21″W / 40.06114°N 105.20586°W / 40.06114; -105.20586
Mission	UNAVCO, a non-profit university-governed consortium, facilitates geoscience research and education using geodesy. We challenge ourselves to transform human understanding of the changing Earth by enabling the integration of innovative technologies, open geodetic observations, and research, from pole to pole.
Website	www.unavco.org
Formerly called	University NAVSTAR Consortium

UNAVCO is a non-profit university-governed consortium that facilitates geoscience research and education using Geodesy. The UNAVCO academic and research community seeks to broaden human understanding of the changing Earth by integrating technologies, open geodetic observations, and research. UNAVCO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and supports research around the world.

As a university-governed consortium, UNAVCO is collectively tasked with advancing and supporting the science goals of the community. UNAVCO currently has over 100 US academic members, and supports over 65 organizations as associate members. Before incorporation in 2001, UNAVCO existed under different organizational umbrellas for nearly two decades as the University Navstar Consortium, then primarily serving geophysicists and geodesists who study tectonic deformation using high-precision GPS technology.

Since 2003, UNAVCO's scope has expanded significantly, with service to new science communities - including those who focus on the deformation of ice, the Earth's response to ground water, sea level, and other aspects of the hydrosphere, and renewed interest in imaging the structure of the atmosphere. UNAVCO has also expanded its support of new geodetic tools: advancing GPS towards mm-level global GPS geodesy and to streaming high rate observations; borehole strain meters and seismometers, expanded geodetic imaging using lidar for Airborne Laser Swath Mapping, InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar), and Terrestrial Laser Scanning, web services and cyberinfrastructure. GPS is finding applications in a frequency range that used to be the sole provenance of seismology, as GPS measurements grow from one solution per day to one solution per second, with high precision.

As of October, 2013, UNAVCO operates the GAGE (Geodesy Advancing Geosciences and EarthScope) Facility, located in Boulder, Colorado with regional offices in San Clemente, California and Anchorage, Alaska. The Facility provides science support through community coordination, field engineering, data services, technology innovation, and instrument testing, acquisition, and deployment. It provides scientific support to global geodetic infrastructure that is developed and operated through international collaborations. EarthScope, a set of integrated geophysical observatories, supports investigation of the entire temporal spectrum of Earth deformation processes. In particular, the Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) provides geodetic imaging of plate boundary deformation.