Waveform Access

The GFZ Seismological Data Archive is the largest seismological data archive in Europe. It holds data from the permanent GEOFON VBB network. Also 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 acquired European networks are members of the Virtual European Broadband Seismic Network (VEBSN). Although the archive consists mostly of data from broad band 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 by GFZ's ArcLink protocol 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 ArcLink, SeedLink, web forms or by e-mail.

Data availability

The following networks and stations are available from the GFZ Seismological Data Archive:

GEOFON/GEVN permanent networks
GIPP/GEOFON temporary networks (also include Task-Force experiments)
transparent access to other GIDA/EIDA nodes through the GFZ ArcLink data portal.

For local archive data availability please check our availability database.

Archive access

Several methods are available to access waveform data from the GEOFON archive:

Direct access through ArcLink, e.g. by using the arclink_fetch command line client.
Through e-mail by sending BREQ_FAST requests to breq_fast@gfz-potsdam.de or breq_fast@webdc.eu
Web-based requests through our web portal, especially for smaller requests.

Archive data shipments by HTTP (web portal or direct ArcLink requests) or FTP (BREQ_FAST requests) only!

Archive access to restricted data

Access is restricted for:

data from recent temporary deployments
some permanent third-party stations/networks for which GEOFON also acts as archive and distribution point

Access to these data may be granted only if the data user can produce written permission from the data producer to use the data, i.e. from the PI of the experiment or a representative of the institution that operates the network. Requests for data access must be sent to GEOFON including the permission statement. Prior to shipment the data will be encrypted and need to be decrypted before use.

Real-Time data feeds

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.

The telemetry status can be displayed by the following SeedLink monitors:

GEOFON SeedLink Monitor for GFZ networks
GEVN SeedLink Monitor for GEOFON partner networks

Data formats

SeedLink real-time data comes in 512 byte Mini-SEED format.
Archive data shipments in 512 or 4096 byte SEED format.
Instrument response information as Dataless SEED volumes or ArcLink XML response files are available through ArcLink and the WebDC data request interface (http://eida.gfz-potsdam.de).
Restricted data is encrypted using OpenSSL.