Thread: Station services update and StationXML schema v 1.1

Started: 2020-02-04 17:20:47
Last activity: 2020-02-04 17:20:47
Topics: Web Services
Robert Weekly
2020-02-04 17:20:47
Attention Web Service Users,

Today the IRIS Web Services group released version 1.1.40 of the fdsnws-station http://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/station/1/ web service along with version 1.0.2 of the ph5ws-station http://service.iris.edu/ph5ws/station/1/ web service.

With these releases, our services are now compliant with the new StationXML v 1.1 schema (for a detailed list of changes from the v 1.0 schema, please refer to this page: https://www.fdsn.org/xml/station/fdsn-station-changes-1.0-to-1.1.txt). While the parameters and behavior of the services are unchanged, the new schema comes with some changes that could potentially impact your workflows and that we would like to explicitly call attention to:

-The services no longer contain artificial end times for channel epochs (e.g., 2599-12-31T23:59:59). If a channel epoch is open-ended, then there is no end time associated with it, and thus, there is no “endDate” attribute in the StationXML for that epoch (see this link http://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/station/1/query?net=IU&sta=ANMO&cha=BHZ&starttime=2020-01-01&level=channel for an example) We have done our best to mitigate the downstream effects of this, but it may for instance, impact some clients that require a date string to parse. Please consider inspecting your workflows for this type of issue if you are suddenly encountering errors in your requests.

-At this time, we have strongly partitioned data stored between our PH5 and miniSEED archives. Data is no longer stored in both archives. This is a significant change for experiments like the IRIS Community Wavefield Experiment (network code YW) because the fdsnws-dataselect service (which provides data from the miniSEED archive) will no longer return data from this experiment. For data sets like these, please consider updating your requests to instead target the ph5ws-dataselect http://service.iris.edu/ph5ws/dataselect/1/ service. If you are using ObsPy, please refer to the following page for more information on using the ph5ws-dataselect service: https://github.com/PIC-IRIS/PH5/wiki/PH5-Web-Services#requesting-data-with-obspy

In addition to the above, we have identified some minor data availability issues that we are diligently working to resolve. Your patience is greatly appreciated as we work to make sure no data gets left behind during this update.

If you are encountering problems with using the new station services, please send an email to ws-issues<at>iris.washington.edu <ws-issues<at>iris.washington.edu> describing the error you are seeing and we will work to resolve it.

Thank you,
IRIS Web Services
13:46:25 v.9bc884e1