# Waveform archives — SeisComP Release documentation

6.9.0

# Waveform archives

## Scope

This chapter describes waveform archives for long-term storage of miniSEED data.

## Overview

While real-time data sources provide data for a rather short amount of time, long-term access to waveforms can be established through waveform archives. The RecordStream interface allows a combined access to real-time data and data in SDS or other archives.

Note

It is assumed that instrument corrections applied to the recorded waveform data result in data in units of the real observations and their unmodified value. Therefore, it is recommended to store only unprocessed raw data in units of digital counts in the waveform archives and to provide the complete inventory referring to input data given in counts.

## SDS archives

SeisComP uses the SeisComP Data Structure (SDS) for archiving miniSEED waveform data. It has the structure:

    archive
      + year
        + network code
          + station code
            + channel code
              + one file per day and location, e.g. NET.STA.LOC.CHAN.D.YEAR.DOY

SeisComP ships with slarchive to create SDS archives from a miniSEED waveform buffer by seedlink in real time and with scart to intergrate miniSEED records from files into an SDS archive. scart can also be used to retrieve miniSEED records from an SDS archive.

## Access to waveform archives

Access from SeisComP processing and GUI modules to waveform archives is realized by RecordStream implementations. The continuity of SDS archives can be monitored by scardac and exposed by the fdsnws availability feature. miniSEED waveforms in SDS archives, can interactively retrieved using scart. Waveforms stored in SDS archives can be served to clients, e.g. using fdsnws.

## Related modules

- caps_plugin

- fdsnws

- scardac

- scart

- slarchive