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Retirement of the irisws-timeseries web service

Tags: data services

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EarthScope Data Services will be retiring the irisws-timeseries web service and its associated microservices as part of our strategic initiative to refine the NSF National Geophysical Facility’s portfolio of data and metadata access capabilities in the cloud.

What you need to know

Omnibus retirement of the irisws-timeseries web service and the following associated microservices:

  • irisws-timeseries — Server-side processing and format conversion of seismic time series data, wrapping fdsnws-dataselect with filtering, decimation, and output formatting capabilities.
  • irisws-tracedsp — The digital signal processing engine underlying the timeseries service, providing server-side filtering and transformation operations.
  • irisws-rotation — Rotation of three-component seismogram data into alternate coordinate systems (e.g., ZNE→RT, ZNE→LQT).
  • irisws-audio — Sonification of seismic waveform data into audible formats.
  • irisws-plotter — Server-side generation of waveform plot images.
  • irisws-ms2sac — Conversion of miniSEED data to SAC (Seismic Analysis Code) format.
  • irisws-ms2ascii — Conversion of miniSEED data to ASCII text format.

When: August 26, 2026 — Full deactivation and retirement of all specified services.

Service description

The irisws-timeseries service has served as a critical tool for requesting and processing seismic time series data, allowing users to apply various filters and transformations to data directly through a web interface. The services listed above form the processing stack that timeseries depends on — providing digital signal processing, coordinate rotation, format conversion, sonification, and plotting capabilities. By retiring this stack as a group, we are prioritizing the transition to more modern, cloud-native data access patterns and client-side post-processing capabilities.

Decommissioning steps

As part of this decommissioning process, EarthScope Data Services will:

  1. Remove all documented references to these services or mark them as defunct.
  2. Update discovery mechanisms to ensure these endpoints are no longer listed as active.
  3. Provide guidance on modern alternatives for high-performance data access within the NSF NGF cloud environment.

Alternatives and migration guidance

The underlying data remains fully available through fdsnws-dataselect at service.earthscope.org/fdsnws/dataselect/1/. The processing, conversion, and visualization capabilities previously provided server-side can be replicated client-side using widely adopted open-source tools.

irisws-timeseries — Utilize fdsnws-dataselect to fetch original miniSEED data, subsequently performing signal processing (e.g., filter(), decimate(), trim()) within a client-side ObsPy environment.

irisws-tracedsp — No explicit user migration required; digital signal processing functionality is integrated directly into the ObsPy framework for data manipulated after retrieval from dataselect.

irisws-rotation — Coordinate transformations are supported through the obspy.signal.rotate module, including the rotate_ne_rt() and rotate_zne_lqt() methods.

irisws-audio — For sonification purposes, waveform data may be exported via ObsPy to NumPy arrays and converted to audible WAV files using scipy.io.wavfile.

irisws-plotter — Transition to the irisws-timeseriesplot service, accessible at service.earthscope.org/irisws/timeseriesplot/1/, or generate plots client-side using ObsPy integrated with Matplotlib.

irisws-ms2sac — Direct conversion from miniSEED to SAC format is achieved using stream.write(format=”SAC”) within the ObsPy library.

irisws-ms2ascii — ASCII text exports are available by reading miniSEED with obspy.read() and writing via TSPAIR or SLIST formatting options.

General guidance: The open-source ObsPy project (https://obspy.org) serves as the primary recommended alternative for replicating these server-side workflows in a modern, programmatic manner.

Questions? Submit a ticket through the help desk or email help@earthscope.org.