The GFZ Seismological Data Archive is the largest seismological data archive in Europe. It holds data from the permanent GEOFON VBB seismic network. For many GEOFON partner networks, GEOFON acts as backup archive and data distribution center. Additionally, data from many temporary station deployments are permanently archived at GEOFON, in particular passive seismological experiments of the GFZ Geophysical Instrument Pool Potsdam (GIPP) and the German Task Force Earthquake (data archival pending).
Real-time data streams from permanent networks are mostly acquired over the Internet and are immediately accessible as continuous data stream by SeedLink real-time feeds or on request from the archive. Most of the European networks acquired are contributed to EIDA. (In part EIDA grew out of an earlier concept, the VEBSN.) Although the archive consists mostly of data from broadband stations, a substantial amount of short period data is archived as well as some strong motion and OBS data.
The GEOFON Data Archive is linked to other partner data centers in Germany (German Integrated Data Archive - GIDA) and Europe (European Integrated Data Archive - EIDA). This integrated data archive infrastructure allows transparent access to the data of all participating archives through a single front-end data portal. All data are accessible in a unified way through FDSN web services and SeedLink.
Method | Open GFZ Nets | Restricted GFZ Data | Other EIDA Nets1 |
---|---|---|---|
WebDC3 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
fdsnws-station | Yes | Yes | No |
fdsnws-dataselect | Yes | Yes | No2 |
Most waveform data archived at GEOFON is open and available to all users. Several methods are available to access waveform data from the GEOFON archive:
Access to some data sets is limited to certain users. For details about obtaining permission to access these, see "Access to restricted archive data". Technical methods for retrieving restricted data are described here. The "EAS User Documentation" has additional details.
After many years, Arclink access ended in December 2019. Synchronisation between EIDA nodes no longer occurs. See ORFEUS's announcement for additional information about the shutdown of this service.
GEOFON/GEVN data are available as real-time data feeds without special permission by the SeedLink protocol from the GEOFON SeedLink server at geofon.gfz-potsdam.de:18000. A visualization of the GEOFON real-time stations is provided in the form of "live" seismogram plots.