Waveform Data

Waveform data and station meta information is organized by utilizing the network, station, location, and channel codes described in the SEED Manual. They are widely employed in the seismological community and serve to uniquely identify a recording instrument.

ASDF organizes all data that can be considered a seismic waveform (an actual seismic recording, barometric or temperature data, …) under the /Waveforms group. Data within that group is organized per seismic station, i.e. a unique combination of network and station code.

/Waveforms Group
Type Group
Path /Waveforms
Required False
Description Contains waveforms and station meta information.

Station Groups

Data under the /Waveforms group is organized per station in a separate group, named {NET}.{STA} where {NET} and {STA} are placeholders for the network and station codes as defined by the SEED standard. The network code can have 1 or 2 letter, the station code between 1 and 5.

/Waveforms/{NET}.{STA} Group
Type Group
Full Path /Waveforms/{NET}.{STA}
RegEx ^[A-Z0-9]{1,2}\\.[A-Z0-9]{1,5}$
Required False
Description Contains waveforms and station meta information for a single station.

StationXML

Each station can have a single FDSN StationXML file associated with it. ASDF does not care about the version of the StationXML file but the file must not contain information about other channels. The file are stored as a binary dump in a data set called StationXML. Thus dealing with the encoding is delegated to whatever XML library reads the binary dump.

/Waveforms/{NET}.{STA}.StationXML Data Set
Type Data Set
Path /Waveforms/{NET}.{STA}.StationXML
Description Station information as a single StationXML file for a particular station.
Data Type H5T_STD_I8LE
Required False
Details 
DATASET "StationXML" {
    DATATYPE  H5T_STD_I8LE
    DATASPACE  SIMPLE {
         ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED )
    }
}

Waveform Traces

The actual waveform data is stored on a per trace basis. A trace is a continuous nice behaving time series from a single channel with a regular sampling interval. It has a defined start time and a sampling rate and no gaps and overlaps. Gaps and overlaps are then represented by having multiple traces. Each station group can have an arbitrary number of traces and each trace can be arbitrarily long.

Allowed data types are half, single, and double precision two’s complement signed integers and single and double precision IEEE 768 floating point numbers which happen to be the native data types on most platforms. HDF5 transparently deals with byte order issues so choose whichever endianness is most suitable for your platform.

Data sets are named according to the scheme

{NET}.{STA}/{NET}.{STA}.{LOC}.{CHA}__{ST}__{ET}__{TAG}

with the following placeholders:

  • {NET}: The network code.
  • {STA}: The station code.
  • {LOC}: The location code.
  • {CHA}: The channel code.
  • {ST}: The approximate start time in UTC as an ISO 8601 date time string. Serves only to generate a suitable data set name. The actual start time is specified as an attribute.
  • {ET}: The approximate end time in UTC as an ISO 8601 date time string. Serves only to generate a suitable data set name.
  • {TAG}: The hierarchical tag. Please read Of Tags and Labels for further explanations.

A full example is

CN.FRB..BHZ__1998-09-01T10:24:49__1998-09-01T12:09:49__tag

and the exact pattern is specificed as a regular expression in the following table.

/Waveforms/{NET}.{STA}/{NET}.{STA}.{LOC}.{CHA}__{ST}__{ET}__{TAG} Data Set
Type Data Set
Full Path /Waveforms/{NET}.{STA}/{NET}.{STA}. {LOC}.{CHA}__{ST}__{ET}__{TAG}
RegEx ^[A-Z0-9]{1,2}\\.[A-Z0-9]{1,5}\\. [A-Z0-9]{0,2}\\.[A-Z0-9]{3}__ (18|19|20|21)\\d{2}-(0[1-9]|1[012]) -(0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])T ([0-1][0-9]|2[0-4]):([0-5]\\d|60): [0-5]\\d(\\.\\d{9})?__(18|19|20|21)\\d{2}- (0[1-9]|1[012])-(0[1-9]|[12][0-9] |3[01])T([0-1][0-9]|2[0-4]): ([0-5]\\d|60):[0-5]\\d(\\.\\d{9})?__ [A-Za-z_0-9]+$
Description Waveform data for a single trace.
Data Type H5T_IEEE_F32LE, H5T_IEEE_F64LE, H5T_IEEE_F32BE, H5T_IEEE_F64BE, H5T_STD_I32LE, H5T_STD_I64LE, H5T_STD_I32BE, H5T_STD_I64BE, H5T_STD_I16LE, H5T_STD_I16BE
Required False
Details 
DATASET
    "NET.STA.LOC.CHA__ST__ET__TAG" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_IEEE_F32LE
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE {
          ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED )
      }
}

Waveform Trace Attributes

The attributes of each trace are described here. Only two are mandatory, the time of the first sample and the sampling interval.

sampling_rate Attribute
Type Attribute
Name sampling_rate
Description The sampling rate of the the waveform trace in Hz. Must naturally be positive and non-zero.
Data Type H5T_IEEE_F64LE, H5T_IEEE_F64BE
Required True
Details 
ATTRIBUTE "sampling_rate" {
   DATATYPE  H5T_IEEE_F64LE
   DATASPACE  SCALAR
}
starttime Attribute
Type Attribute
Name starttime
Description The time of the first sample as a UNIX epoch time in nanoseconds in UTC. It provides an approximate temporal range from the year 1680 to 2260 which is plenty for all envisioned applications.
Data Type H5T_STD_I64LE, H5T_STD_I64BE
Required True
Details 
ATTRIBUTE "starttime" {
   DATATYPE  H5T_STD_I64LE
   DATASPACE  SCALAR
}

Provenance for that trace can be stored as an identifier to a certain provenance record which represents that particular trace. It is possible (and recommended) but not necessary that a provenance document in the Provenance contains a record with that id.

provenance_id Attribute
Type Attribute
Name provenance_id
Description The id of a provenance record representing the current state of the waveform trace.
Required False
Details 
ATTRIBUTE "provenance_id" {
    DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
        STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLPAD;
        CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
        CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
    }
    DATASPACE  SCALAR;
}

Next are four optional identifiers that refer to different elements within a QuakeML file and enable the association of a waveform trace with an event or a specific origin, magnitude, or focal mechanism. The later three are mainly of interest for synthetic data where these three are exactly known.

event_id Attribute
Type Attribute
Name event_id
Description The id of the event associated with that waveform. Can contain several comma-separated ids.
Required False
Details 
ATTRIBUTE "event_id" {
    DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
        STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLPAD;
        CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
        CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
    }
    DATASPACE  SCALAR;
}
origin_id Attribute
Type Attribute
Name origin_id
Description The id of the orgin associated with that waveform. Can contain several comma-separated ids.
Required False
Details 
ATTRIBUTE "origin_id" {
    DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
        STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLPAD;
        CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
        CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
    }
    DATASPACE  SCALAR;
}
magnitude_id Attribute
Type Attribute
Name magnitude_id
Description The id of the magnitude associated with that waveform. Can contain several comma-separated ids.
Required False
Details 
ATTRIBUTE "magnitude_id" {
    DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
        STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLPAD;
        CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
        CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
    }
    DATASPACE  SCALAR;
}
focal_mechanism_id Attribute
Type Attribute
Name focal_mechanism_id
Description The id of the focal mechanism associated with that waveform. Can contain several comma-separated ids.
Required False
Details 
ATTRIBUTE "focal_mechanism_id" {
    DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
        STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLPAD;
        CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
        CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
    }
    DATASPACE  SCALAR;
}

Last but not least each waveform trace can also have any number of labels associated with it. Please note that these are different from tags, see Of Tags and Labels for details. The labels are stored as comma separated UTF-8 strings so the two labels label 1, and äöü would be stored as "label 1, äöü".

labels Attribute
Type Attribute
Name labels
Description The labels of this waveform as a comma-separated UTF-8 string.
Required False
Details 
ATTRIBUTE "labels" {
   DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
      STRSIZE H5T_VARIABLE;
      STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLTERM;
      CSET H5T_CSET_UTF8;
      CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
   }
   DATASPACE  SCALAR
}