Need Data? The IRIS DMC can help [SSA 2014]
C. Trabant, T. Ahern, R. Casey, C. Reyes, Y. Suleiman, B. Weertman, R. Benson
(May 2014)
Abstract
The IRIS Data Management Center (DMC) is the repository and access point for all past and future USArray data, including the USArray data from Alaska, along with data from many other deployments and networks. This presentation will cover the most important data access mechanisms and recent developments. In addition, we will highlight our work related to quality assurance.
Web service interfaces at the DMC provide access to a vast archive of seismological and related geophysical data. These interfaces are designed to easily incorporate data access into data processing workflows. Examples of data that may be accessed include: time series data, related metadata, and earthquake information. The DMC has developed command line scripts, MATLAB® interfaces and a Java library to support a wide variety of data access needs. Users of these interfaces do not need to concern themselves with web service details, networking, or even (in most cases) data conversion.
The DMC’s core web services are conformant with the standard adopted by the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN). We have assisted a number of other seismological data centers, primarily in Europe, to install these same service interfaces to their data sets. For the end user this means that the same software can be used to access data from multiple data centers.
Finally, the DMC has been working on a system to calculate quality-related metrics from the raw data in our archive. These measurements are primarily designed to assist in the quantification of quality of the raw time series data. The results will be very useful for network operators to pinpoint problems with their data. Additionally the measurements will be useful to end users in as least two important ways: 1) the measurements themselves can be useful to interpret and 2) as a means to reject bad data prior to input into a processing system.