The Mw7.1 Hector Mine, California Earthquake

October 16, 1999, Mw7.1 ERS interferometry

Gilles Peltzer, Frédéric Crampé, and Paul Rosen

    The image is an interferometric map of the Hector Mine earthquake area showing the ground displacement along the radar line of sight. One full color cycle represents 10 cm of range displacement. Gray areas are zones of low phase coherence that have been masked before unwrapping. Dotted lines depict California faults, after Jennings (1975), and thick, solid lines the Landers , 1992 surface rupture, after Sieh et al. (1993). Thin, solid lines within zone of dense fringes are surface breaks inferred from azimuth and range disparities (offsets) between before and after images, and phase discontinuities. 
   The topographic phase has been removed using a combination of the USGS 30 m and 90 m digital elevation maps. The rapid orbits from the ESA D-PAF were used to determine the interferometric baseline and to flatten the map. A small phase ramp was removed manually to minimize the far field displacement. Processing from RAW data to interferogram and geocoded map was done using the JPL/Caltech ROI_PAC software package. 

   The radar data were acquired by the European Space Agency ERS-2 satellite on September 15 and October 20, 1999. The data used here cover frames 2907 and 2925 of descending track 127. The post-earthquake data were purchased from Eurimage and transfered from the Centre Canadien de Teledetection to JPL via FTP. 
 

Full resolution JPEG image (1.5 MB)
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Peltzer, Crampé, and Rosen, 2001
The Mw 7.1, Hector Mine, California earthquake: surface rupture, surface displacement field, and fault slip solution from ERS SAR data. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

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