EarthScope Data Services will be retiring the irisws-flinnengdahl web service as a part of our effort to refine the NSF National Geophysical Facility’s portfolio of data and metadata access capabilities in the cloud.
What: Retirement of https://service.iris.edu/irisws/flinnengdahl/2/
When: On or after July 06, 2026
The Flinn-Engdahl webservice returns the Flinn-Engdahl region code, or region name, or both for a specified latitude and longitude. Since its introduction in 2011, the service has seen only moderate use and primarily from ObsPy, which includes a built-in alternative for over 10 years. Given the usage and available alternatives we are retiring this service.
Alternatives
For those that want access to Flinn-Engdahl region lookups:
- The obspy.geodetics module provides an option for FE regions for Python.
- EMSC/EPOS has a queryable web service that might be a good option.
- The EMSC/EPOS website also offers a nice interactive interface for FE regions.
For those that want other options:
- Mapbox Geocoding API (online free tier allowing 100K requests/month)
- OpenCage Geocoder (2500 free requests per day)
- reverse_geocoder (A localized python solution that makes use of a GeoNames in-memory K-Dimensional tree.)