Welcome to the Supersite Website
The Supersites have data for the study of natural hazards in geologically active regions,
including information from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), GPS crustal deformation measurements, and earthquakes.
The data are provided in the spirit of GEO, ESA, NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF),
that easy access to Earth science data will promote their use and advance scientific research,
ultimately leading to reduced loss of life from natural hazards.
Supersites is an initiative of the geohazard scientific community.
The Supersites provide access to spaceborne and in-situ geophysical data of
selected sites prone to earthquake, volcano or other hazards. The initiative
began with the "Frascati declaration" at the conclusion of the 3rd International
Geohazards workshop of the Group of Earth Observation (GEO) held in November 2007 in Frascati, Italy.
The recommendation of the workshop was “to stimulate an international and intergovernmental effort to
monitor and study selected reference sites by establishing open access to relevant datasets according
to GEO principles to foster the collaboration between all various partners and end-users”. This recommendation is formalized as GEO task DI-09-010.
The spaceborne portion of the Supersite initiative was initiated at the Second International Workshop
on the Use of Remote Sensing Techniques for monitoring Volcanoes and Seismogenic Areas held in November 2008 in Naples, Italy (USEReST).
Many of the workshop participants from research institutions and geological surveys around the world agreed to make SAR and in-situ data
available Supersites (listing below). ESA agreed to provide the IT infrastructure for access to the SAR data (ESA’s Virtual Archive).
The discussions are summarized here