2026 CRESCENT Technical Short Course: Strain Accumulation and Release from GNSS#
June 15–17, 2026 | Virtual
This repository contains materials for the Strain Accumulation and Release from GNSS technical short course offered through CRESCENT.
This course provides requisite tools for recognizing how earthquake cycle signatures in the Cascadia Subduction Zone are expressed in geodetic observations. It will introduce basic processing of geodetic time series to interpret longer-term strain accumulation processes and slow slip events. It will cover extracting velocities and displacements from geodetic time-series observations and introduce basic inverse methods to use geodetic data to constrain fault slip patterns.
For course details, please visit the course webpage.
Course Materials#
Day 1
Lecture Slides: Course and Geodesy Intro (Tim Melbourne)
Lecture Slides: Intro to GNSS (Brendan Crowell)
Notebook 1: GNSS Fundamentals (Brendan Crowell)
Notebook 2: GNSS Time Series (Brendan Crowell)
Day 2
Lecture Slides: Fault Slip and Displacement (Jack Loveless)
Notebook 1: Fault Displacement (Jack Loveless)
Day 3
Lecture Slides: Earth Structure Effects (Kaj Johnson)
Notebook 1: Slip Inversion Demo (Kaj Johnson)
Notebook 2: Layered Model Demo (Kaj Johnson)
Notebook 3: Compliant Wedge Model Demo (Kaj Johnson)
Notebook 4: Viscoelastic Cycle Demo (Kaj Johnson)
Notebook 5: Slip Inversion Activities (Kaj Johnson)
Course Computing Environment (EarthScope GeoLab)#
This course used the EarthScope Consortium’s GeoLab as its computing environment for all course activities. GeoLab is a browser-based JupyterHub platform that provides a ready-to-use scientific Python environment, allowing participants to run the course notebooks without installing software locally.
The course notebooks were developed to run in GeoLab and remain compatible with that environment. Now that GeoLab is open to the broader Earth science community, anyone with an EarthScope User Account can use GeoLab to run the notebooks in this repository.
Accessing GeoLab
To use GeoLab, you will need an EarthScope User Account. If you do not already have one, you can create a free account here:
EarthScope User Account: https://www.earthscope.org/user/
Launch GeoLab: https://www.earthscope.org/data/geolab/
Additional GeoLab resources from EarthScope include:
GeoLab Documentation: https://docs.earthscope.org/geolab/getting-started
Cloud Foundations tutorials: https://docs.earthscope.org/geolab/getting-started/examples-tutorials
GeoLab Learning Hub (example notebooks): EarthScope/GeoLab-learning-hub
Need Help? Discourse forum: https://earthscope.discourse.group
Running the notebooks locally
If you prefer to run the notebooks on your own computer, you can create a local Python environment using the environment.yml file included in this repository. This file lists the software dependencies required to run the course notebooks outside of GeoLab.
Instructors#
Brendan Crowell (Ohio State University)
Jack Loveless (Smith College)
Kaj Johnson (Indiana University Bloomington)
Tim Melbourne (Central Washington University)