Archiving Data

Happy 2011, and thank you for your active participation during the PASSCAL Pre-AGU workshop (December 2010)!  We appreciate your input and your questions.

The Standard for the Exchange of Earthquake Data (SEED) is an international standard format for the exchange of digital seismological data.  SEED was designed for use by the earthquake research community, primarily for the exchange between institutions of unprocessed earth motion data.  It is a format for digital data measured at one point in space and at equal intervals of time.

The SEED reference manual (version 2.4) is published by the Federation of Digital Seismographic Networks (FDSN), the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

PH5 data flow. The left column shows the general process one follows during the preparation of a PH5 data set.  The right side shows the various software tools and files necessary to complete the process.

Here you will find information describing active source data formats: PH5, recommended for archiving data and SEG-Y, required by the user community for analysis and research.

PH5 is the recommended archival format for active source data sets.  PASSCAL has transitioned from SEG-Y to PH5, PASSCAL's implementation of the hierarchical data format, version 5 (HDF5) data model, as the preferred archival format for active source data sets.  The strengths of HDF5 made it an attractive model for an active source archival data format.

HDF5:

Refer to the documentations below to learn how to prepare the data you've collected for archiving.  PASSCAL supports PH5 and SEGY as the archival data formats of active-source data sets.

Data from PH5 format data sets archived at the DMC can be accessed via PH5 Web Services.

The SEG-Y file written by ph5toseg is in big endian byte order and attempts to follow the SEG-Y rev 1 standard (May 2002) as outlined in the table below.

The file does not contain a Tape Label.

The Society of Exploration Geophysicists Y Format, or SEG Y, has been the accepted exploration industry data format for digital seismic data since 1975.  Originally a magnetic tape-centric format, SEG Y has evolved over the years to remain the data format industry standard for data analysis and processing.  The latest revision (revision 1 .pdf format) to the format was released in 2002. 

All data requests of PH5 format data sets are fulfilled as either SEG-Y or PASSCAL SEG-Y.