Archiving and Translating Seismic Data using HDF5

Data collected with PASSCAL (Program for Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere) and USArray Flexible Array equipment are required to be archived at the IRIS Data Management Center (DMC) and are required to be openly available to the community. Persons receiving funding for experiments that use IRIS/PASSCAL (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology/Program for Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere) facilities and equipment are required to submit the data collected to the IRIS DMC for archiving. One of the services we perform at IRIS/PASSCAL is to assist principle investigators to archive active source seismic experiments as well as provide data to them in the commonly used analysis format: SEG-Y. Historically data from these experiments was sent to the DMC archive in SEG-Y format but because of the static nature of SEG-Y, it has been found to be much more efficient to use HDF5 as an archival and intermediary format to SEG-Y. PH5 is PASSCAL's file organization of HDF5 used for active source data. The extensibility and portability of HDF5 allows the PH5 format to evolve and operate on a variety of platforms and interfaces. Storing data in HDF5 format also facilitates the interactive production of SEG-Y gathers, as well as other common seismic data formats based on varying and flexible data request parameters. To make PH5 more flexible it has now been updated to separate the seismic meta-data from the time series data in order to get achieve gains in performance as well as ease of use and to simplify user interaction. By separating the meta-data we are able to provide a better web based interface for data requests. The recently developed web interface generates a unique web form and pre-populates much of it based on the meta-data provided to it from the PH5 file. The data requester then can intuitively select the extraction parameters as well as data subsets they wish to receive. The web interface then passes this on to the PH5 processing tools to generate the requested SEG-Y data.

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Last modified: 06/02/2017