Southern California Earthquake Data Now Available in the AWS Cloud

Ellen Yu, Aparna Bhaskaran, Shang-Lin Chen, Zachary E. Ross, Egill Hauksson, & Robert W. Clayton

Published June 16, 2021, SCEC Contribution #11739

The Southern California Earthquake Data Center is hosting its earthquake catalog and seismic waveform archive in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Open Dataset Program (s3://scedc‐pds; us‐west‐2 region). The cloud dataset’s high data availability and scalability facilitate research that uses large volumes of data and computationally intensive processing. We describe the data archive and our rationale for the formats and data organization. We provide two simple examples to show how storing the data in AWS Simple Storage Service can benefit the analysis of large datasets. We share usage statistics of our data during the first year in the AWS Open Dataset Program. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities of a cloud‐hosted archive.

Citation
Yu, E., Bhaskaran, A., Chen, S., Ross, Z. E., Hauksson, E., & Clayton, R. W. (2021). Southern California Earthquake Data Now Available in the AWS Cloud. Seismological Research Letters, 92(5), 3238-3247. doi: 10.1785/0220210039.