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This service provides access to real-time geophysical data streams collected by our data platform. Data streams in this service are those collected or made available in the miniSEED format.

SeedLink is an open protocol for the real-time transfer of time-series data, primarily seismic waveforms, and is the de facto standard for streaming continuous seismic data between data centers, observatories, and end users.

Connection details

The EarthScope SeedLink server is available on the following address and ports:

Host: rtserve.earthscope.org

Ports:

Usage restrictions

This is a shared service: users are welcome to any data available via the server as long as client actions do not inhibit our capability to deliver data to other users. Users should strive to minimize the number of connections to the service. SeedLink allows selection of a nearly arbitrary set of channels using a single connection. We reserve the right to enforce connection limits in order to ensure that the service is available to a broad range of users and to maintain a stable service.

Expectations regarding streaming data from the EarthScope platform

This service offers data streams collected by our data platform for archiving. As such, the availability, completeness, latency, and other characteristics of the streams cannot be guaranteed; any dropouts or highly-latent streams are nearly always caused by upstream data delivery to the platform, not by the streaming service itself. The internal systems add minimal latency to the streams, normally well below 1 second.

The SeedLink protocols support resuming data flow on re-connection. Data stream history should not be expected to exceed 1 hour. The amount of data stream history available also depends on the protocol specifics.

The service has no guarantee of data continuity. Time-series data gaps in streams may be filled in the archive later, but they may not be distributed via this service.

Protocol support

This service supports the SeedLink v4 protocol specified by the International FDSN. The service also supports the legacy, and commonly used, SeedLink v3 protocol; the depth of data stream history with this legacy protocol is reduced relative to v4.

Both SeedLink protocols are accessible via WebSocket RFC 6455. In this usage, the SeedLink protocol is used directly inside a WebSocket transport layer, with each client command and server response contained in a single WebSocket frame.

Subscribe to receive service status notifications

Subscribe to data-announcements@earthscope.org mailing list for announcements of changes to this service.

Looking for real-time GNSS data streams?

See the GNSS real-time data streams page.