Access to seismological data

The BCSF-Rénass provides FDSN (Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks) web services that enable standardised access to seismic data. These services facilitate the retrieval of earthquake catalogues, information on seismological stations and seismograms.

This guide explains how to access this data via a shell script, the Python library ObsPy, and the BCSF-Rénass search engine.

Types of data available

Earthquake catalogues: Consult seismic events recorded by the BCSF-Rénass. A simple text format is available, as well as a complete catalogue in QuakeML format, intended for seismologists.
Station information: Access metadata on seismological stations (location, characteristics) via the Epos-France seismological portal.
Seismograms: Retrieve the signals recorded by Epos-France stations, allowing you to observe seismic waves over time.

Access to data

Request via terminal (Shell)

Use curl to query RESIF’s FDSN web service and retrieve seismic events:

curl -o events.txt "https://api.franceseisme.fr/fdsnws/event/1/query?starttime=2023-06-01T00:00:00&endtime=2023-07-01T00:00:00&minmagnitude=4&eventtype=earthquake&format=text"

This command extracts earthquakes from June 2023 with a minimum magnitude of 4 in text format.

Query in Python with ObsPy

With ObsPy, you can access FDSN data with just a few lines of code:

from obspy.clients.fdsn import Client

# Creating an FDSN client
# Use ‘RESIF’ to access the BCSF-Rénass event web service
client = Client("RESIF")

# Event query
catalog = client.get_events(
    starttime="2023-06-01", endtime="2023-07-01",
    minmagnitude=4, eventtype="earthquake")

# Event display
for event in catalog:
    print(event)

This script retrieves events between 1 June and 1 July 2023, with a minimum magnitude of 4.

Search via BCSF-Rénass

The BCSF-Rénass search engine provides access to seismic events online:

BSCF-Rénass search engine

This portal is ideal for conducting targeted searches on earthquakes in France.

Full access to data

FDSN services provide access to seismicity catalogues, seismograms and station metadata. By using ObsPy’s FDSN client with ‘RESIF’, you can consult both the BCSF-Rénass catalogues and the Epos-France station data, providing a comprehensive overview of the available seismic data.

Use of data

License

The data (seismicity catalogs, station information, seismograms) are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0. This means that it can be freely used and distributed, provided that the data producers are duly cited. No additional restrictions may be applied to the datasets when they are redistributed.

Citation

If you use the BCSF-Rénass earthquake catalogs for your research, please use the following citation:

re3data.org (2022). Bureau Central Sismologique Français - Réseau National de Surveillance Sismique. re3data.org - Registry of Research Data Repositories. https://doi.org/10.17616/R31NJNC4

The Epos-France networks have DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) associated with their codes, in accordance with the FDSN recommendations (2014). If you use Epos-France data for your research, you must cite these DOIs in your acknowledgments or references. Citation information for each network can be found on its page.