Access Data

Cloud Hosted Archive

The SCEDC Earthquake Data AWS Public Dataset

AWS Bucket Name and Region: s3://scedc-pds; us-west-2

The SCEDC archives and distributes continuous ground velocity and acceleration waveforms recorded by the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN). Currently the SCSN records over 540 stations in the Southern California region. We are pleased to announce that these holdings are now also part of the AWS Public Dataset program. Continuous archive begins in 1999 with 1-20 sps broadband sensor recordings. Continuous archive of 100 sps broadband begins in 2008. Upload of strong motion and short period data (2018-present) is in progress.

Station metadata from CI network stations and the SCSN earthquake catalog (1932-present) is also included in the dataset.

All data is updated daily.

Continuous Waveforms
Event-Based Waveforms
Event Phases
Earthquake Catalog
Station Metadata

Ridgecrest DAS Dataset

The SCEDC also hosts a Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) dataset to support the seismological community's exploration of these datasets. This data was recorded between 2020/06/23 and 2020/07/29 along a fiber between Ridgecrest and Inyokern airport.

Data organization

Ridgecrest_DAS/das_info.csv contains DAS channel information.
Each file in Ridgecrest_DAS/SEG-Y/hourly contains one hour of 250 Hz data in SEG-Y format.

File naming convention
YYYYMMDDHH.segy

File format
PASSCAL SEG-Y

A Jupyter notebook demonstrating how to retrieve DAS data, and how to window and down sample data can be found in our Github repository

Continuous Waveforms

Data organization

These are waveforms continuously recorded by the SCSN.

The top level keyname for continous data is "continuous_waveforms"
Each file is one day, starting 00:00:00 UTC. A single channel is uniquely represented by a network code, station code, channel code, location code. See "References" section below for more information on these codes.
Each file has key names for the year (4 digit) and the day of the year (3 digit [001-366]).
continuous_waveforms/
  YYYY/
   YYYY_DOY/
     filename/
Example: continuous_waveforms/2017/2017_010/CIGSC__HNZ___2017010.ms
The data may contain gaps.

File naming convention

[Network code][Station code][Channel code][Location code]_[year][day of year].ms

Examples: CIGSC__HNZ___2017010.ms, CIPASC_HHZ012017010.ms) where:

[Network code] = 2 letter SEED network code
[Station code] = 5 letter SEED station code
[Channel code] = 3 letter SEED channel code
[Location code] = 2 letter SEED location code
[Location code] = 2 letter SEED location code
[day of the year] = 3 digit day of the year (aka ordinal date)

File format: miniSEED

Event Based Waveforms

These are waveforms whose time windows are centered around an event in the SCSN catalog.

Data organization

The top level keyname for event based waveforms is "event_waveforms"
Each file is one event, comprising of time series of seismic channels, written out one after another. The window should encompass the arrival of the events energy at the channel. The file name is the SCSN catalog event id

File format: miniSEED

Event Phases

These files contain the phase arrivals for an event in the SCSN catalog.

Data organization

The top level keyname for event based phases is "event_phases"
Each file is one event, in the STP Phase output (See STP manual page 34). The file name is the SCSN catalog event id

File format: STP Phase format

Southern California Seismic Network Earthquake Catalog

These files are lists of events detected by the SCSN and their summary information.

Data organization

Earthquake summary information is stored in files by year. Key names are "earthquake_catalogs" and "SCEC_DC". The files are the same format as the pre-made catalog text files and are version controlled in a Github repository
earthquake_catalogs/
SCEC_DC/
filename/
Example:earthquake_catalogs/SCEC_DC/2019.catalog

Metadata Structure

These files describe the station metadata and instrument response for seismic sites in the CI network.

Data organization

Each file contains metadata for a single station for all epochs. Key names are "FDSNstationXML" and the network code "CI".
FDSNstationXML/
CI/
filename/
Example: FDSNstationXML/CI/CI_GSC.xml
Only CI network stations are hosted in the public dataset. Please see the authoritative network for stations that do not have a CI network code.

File naming convention
[Network code]_[Station code].xml
(ex: CI_GSC xml,CI_PASC.xml)

File format
FDSN StationXML

References

Southern California Seismic Network Description of the network, its reporting region and typical station installations
AWS Public Dataset program AWS Open Dataset Registry Listing
Description of miniSEED and SEED Formats from IRIS website. Includes standards for network, station, channel, location codes.
Description of SCEDC earthquake catalog format Description of column definitions of earthquake catalog format
Description of FDSN StationXML from FDSN (International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks) website
List of FDSN Networks from FDSN (International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks) website
SEG-Y rev1 Data Exchange format from SEG Technical Standards Committee
Ridgecrest DAS notebook by Jiuxun Yin