Findings and Recommendations - Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science - page 110

acquisition (see Table A.3 ). Such partnerships have leveraged the science that
EAR is able to support, and there are tangible reasons for expanding them in the
future. For example, there must be continuing interaction between EAR and
USGS on the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) and EarthScope, which
are closely related and complementary initiatives. 37 It would therefore be
effective and beneficial to present the ANSS and EarthScope projects to Congress
as a coordinated budget request. An exceptionally promising example of where
close interagency collaboration will be fruitful is in the development of InSAR
capabilities for measuring active deformation, another major objective of
EarthScope. The satellites capable of InSAR imaging will be flown by NASA,
but the interpretation of data requires the integration of InSAR data with field
studies and other ground-based data collection efforts, activities that should be
sponsored through EAR. Indeed, laboratory and field studies supported by EAR
are essential for calibrating, validating, and helping to interpret a wide variety of
remote-sensing measurements, including gravity, magnetic, and geodetic
observations carried out by NASA and other agencies.
REQUIRED RESOURCES
The committee's recommendations, taken together, lay out a basis for the
way in which EAR can respond to major Earth science challenges and
opportunities in the next decade. It should be noted that, in developing its
recommendations, the committee did not review the existing EAR program or
other federal research programs. Rather, it focused on new research areas that
could be added to the EAR portfolio. Consequently, the budget estimates given
below will have to be evaluated in a broader context that was not possible in this
study.
The committee estimates that the new funding needed to implement these
recommendations would increase the EAR budget by about two-thirds
( Table 3.1 ). This increase will help to offset the recent decline in federal support
of basic Earth science and will substantially strengthen the national effort in this
important area of fundamental research.
37 The EarthScope science plan calls for an upgrading of 30 stations of the U.S.
National Seismograph Network to the higher-performance standards of the NSF-sponsored
GSN, which will benefit USGS in its mission of monitoring earthquakes, while the ANSS
deployment plan calls for upgrading regional seismic networks that will assist the
EarthScope community in imaging the continental crust and upper mantle at higher
resolution.