Frequently Answered Question

Question

What channels are available and what channels should I request?

Answer

There are a number of tools you can use to get channels that are available for a given station.

First it is important to understand how channel codes are constructed. The Data Channels Tool demonstrates what the components of a channel code mean.

An easy path is to use MDA to discover which channels are operating for a station at a particular time. You can also check for data availability by selecting the appropriate year. This will take you to a tool that will show the data coverage we have for that channel.

Another method is to make use of DMC Web Services. The FDSN station service is particularly good at helping you to narrow down which channels you can expect to get data for, for any given station, by using wildcards in the channel parameter (such as * or ?). You can also search in a particular geographic area. The output from this service can be used directly to feed the FDSN dataselect service to actually request the data.

There are many other ways you can discover data at IRIS DMC. Please consult our main data page for more information.



Updated: 05/19/2017
10:39:30 v.9bc884e1