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Our fdsnws-availability web service, the primary source of time series coverage metadata for our miniSEED repository, will be out of service for an undetermined period of time starting on Monday, July 27, after which requests will result in HTTP 410 (Gone). We are working on a replacement system and will make it available as soon as possible.

This change is related to our decommissioning of the Seattle data center and transition to cloud services. The hardware systems supporting the legacy service in Seattle are being retired. A replacement system in the cloud will be developed but will not be ready before the legacy system is turned off.

Data availability indicators such as daily percent availability and maximum gaps will remain accessible in MUSTANG (see below for details).

If this service is critical to your data access please contact help@earthscope.org and we may be able to help you with alternatives.

A replacement service

The replacement service will have stricter limits on queries compared to the legacy service, but we expect the majority of access patterns to be supported. Anticipated changes for the replacement services include:

• Data “quality” removed — The new service will not support tracking or reporting of miniSEED record data qualities and will report quality as “D” (the value indicating unknown quality) in responses that require a value. The quality parameter will still be accepted for backwards compatibility, but will have no effect.
• The merge parameter may not be supported. The delivered response includes time spans for distinct combinations of FDSN Source ID and sample rate. The parameter will be accepted for backwards compatibility, but will have no effect.
• The orderby parameter may not be supported. The delivered sort order is by FDSN Source ID, sample rate, start and end time. The response can be sorted as desired after being received if alternate sorting is needed.
• The includerestricted parameter may not be supported. By default information about restricted data holdings will be included in the response initially. This feature may be restored based on demand.
• The queryauth and extentauth endpoints will not initially be supported. These provide user-specific responses including or excluding restricted data depending on accessibility by the user.
• Large queries, e.g. all channels for a network for all time, will no longer be supported and an HTTP 413 indicating the requested response is too large will be returned.

Downstream Impact on MUSTANG quality metrics

While our fdsnws-availability service is out of service, the MUSTANG quality metrics system will not be able to return metrics that are derived from the availability service. Metrics affected have names that are prefaced by ‘ts_’, e.g., ‘ts_percent_availability’ or ‘ts_num_gaps’. Availability metrics not derived from the availability service but calculated from the actual data, such as ‘percent_availability’, ‘max_gap’, and ‘num_gaps’, will be unaffected and remain accessible.

Please reach out to help@earthscope.org if you have any questions.