Data Centers

Nowadays, there are terabytes/petabytes of seismic data collected every years. Most oil & gas companies have their own data centers to store this data. In academia, some international and regional data centers provide seismic data to researches, e.g., IRIS DMC.

Different data centers provide data via different ways. Now, most data centers support FDSN web service. Thus, we can use tools, e.g., SOD and ObsPy, to download data from those data centers.

Data Centers Supporting FDSN Web Services: https://www.fdsn.org/webservices/datacenters/

IRIS DMC

IRIS DMC (Data Management Center of Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology) is the largest data center in the world and has provided a lot of seismic data to reseacheres for many years. Most data at the IRIS DMC is open to public immediately or after an embargo of a period of time (e.g. 2 years).

USA

European Integrated Data Archive

ORFEUS is the non-profit foundation to coordinate and promote digital, broadband seismology in the European-Mediterranean area.

EIDA is the European Integrated Data Archive infrastructure within ORFEUS to provide access to seismic waveform data in European archives. You can think ORFEUS is IRIS, and EIDA is IRIS-DMC.

There are also many regional data centers in Europe. They send their data to EIDA, but they may also have some data that are sent to EIDA.