Question
Why does Wilber report "No data found"?
I submitted a data request through Wilber, and everything looked fine, but then I got an email saying “No data found.” What happened?
Answer
Wilber gets its station information through the fdsnws-event web service, which indicates the dates that a particular instrument was in service, but this does not always reflect the actual availability of data. Instrument errors, data transmission problems, or other factors may result in gaps in the available data.
If this is a very recent event then data may simply have not been received from the reporting station yet. In that case, the best option is to retry the request at a later time. Most data is available within a few minutes, but in some cases it may be hours or even days before we receive all available data.
Gaps in older data are more likely due to an error in the gathering or reporting process, and indicate truly missing data.
We are working on making more fine-grained availability information available for tools like Wilber, but at this time the only way to check whether data is truly available is to actually request it. Wilber is designed to handle requests containing hundreds or thousands of data channels, so it is infeasible for Wilber to perform this level of checking on all channels in a request beforehand.
If you want to check a particular station/channel for data availability before submitting a request through Wilber, the easiest option is to click on the station code in the table on the Select Stations page, which will show a preview of the given station’s data. Since this is a real data request, it will reflect the true data availability.
