PBO FAQs


General

What is PBO?: PBO is an acronym for Plate Boundary Observatory, the geodetic component of the National Science Foundation funded program called EarthScope



How do I contact someone at PBO?: You can use the Contact web page under About PBO to submit an Email and obtain phone numbers or mailing addresses. You may also contact individuals directly using the Personnel web page under About PBO.



Who manages PBO?: The Plate Boundary Observatory facility has been awarded to UNAVCO, a non-profit, membership-governed consortium that facilitates geoscience research and education using geodesy.



What are PBO Stations?: PBO Stations are permenantly installed geodetic instruments and supporting equipment located at a permitted, geophysically relevant location.



Global Positioning System (GPS)

What are the GPS receiver specifications?: PBO uses Trimble NetRS and NetR9 GPS Receivers for all permanently installed stations.



First Five Years (2003 - 2009)
  • Installed 891 permanent Global Positioning System (GPS) stations to monitor the active plate boundary between the North American and Pacific tectonic plates
  • Integrated 209 existing GPS stations that were upgraded to EarthScope standards by the PBO Nucleus Project
  • Installed 74 deep borehole strainmeters and 78 short-period borehole seismometers within the EarthScope footprint
  • Installed five long-baseline laser strainmeters along the San Andreas Fault zone
  • Installed 26 tiltmeters on active volcanoes in the western United States and Alaska
  • Acquired over 5000 km2 of high-resolution airborne LiDAR data
  • Acquired over 36,866 InSAR scenes totaling 15 terabytes of data
  • Maintained a pool of 100 portable campaign GPS instruments and supported over 50 related science projects
  • Cumulative data return for the entire network exceeds 95%
  • Collected and archived over 22 terabytes of PBO EarthScope data
  • Provided over 2,000,000 data and product files to the scientific research community

SPONSORED BY

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

National Aeronautics and
Space Administration
National Science Foundation

National
Science
Foundation