[webservices] units in quakeml/event ws

Philip Crotwell crotwell at seis.sc.edu
Wed Mar 13 11:41:20 PDT 2013


Hi

The quakeml spec (1.2) says that this depth field in an origin is in meters.

 depth Depth of hypocenter with respect to the nominal sea level given by
the WGS84 geoid (Earth Gravitational Model, EGM96, Lemoine et al.
1998). Positive
values indicate hypocenters below sea level. For shallow hypocenters, the depth
value can be negative. Note: Other standards use different conventions for
depth measurement. As an example, GSE2.0, defines depth with respect to the
local surface. If event data is converted from other formats to QuakeML,
depth values may have to be modified accordingly.

Unit: m

But when I query the event ws, the values that come back look like they are
in kilometers, ie 33 instead of 33000 like in this:

<origin publicID="smi:www.iris.edu/ws/event/query?originId=4908125"
iris:contributor="NEIC PDE-M" iris:catalog="NEIC
PDE"><time><value>1999-08-17T15:06:27.0700</value></time><creationInfo><author>NEIC</author></creationInfo><latitude><value>34.814</value></latitude><longitude><value>32.859</value></longitude><depth><value>33.0</value></depth></origin>


QuakeML doesn't have a "units" field, so it can't just be labeled as "m" or
"km".

Is this a bug, or is the iris ws just choosing to not follow the spec?

thanks
Philip
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