The Future of Seismological Data Centers: Recent Advances and Vision for the Next-Generation Data Services

Over the past decades, seismological data centers within the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN; www.fdsn.org) have worked together to establish and implement standards for waveform data (miniSEED), metadata (StationXML), and web service APIs for data discovery, distribution and quality control. These have been broadly adopted, and today enable the seismological community to seamlessly access data from FDSN data centers across the world. Meanwhile, driven by applications related to environmental monitoring and Machine Learning, users increasingly demand access to massive data volumes and intensive computation, best addressed by using computational resources near to the data. Despite efforts to make an unprecedented amount of data openly and FAIRly available, the existing synchronous services, such as fdsnws-dataselect, are hampering the full use of data by the next generation of scientists. Faced with this challenge, some data centers are starting to design asynchronous data access mechanisms optimized for large volumes and efficient handling in object storage facilities. New use cases that are difficult to realize with the current infrastructure or to describe with current metadata formats include, for example, those involving large volumes generated by Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) as well as dense, multidisciplinary experiments bridging land and sea observations. In spring 2024, supported by the Geo-INQUIRE project, European data centers representing the European Integrated Data Archive (EIDA; www.orfeus-eu.org/data/eida) within ORFEUS (www.orfeus-eu.org, a part of the EPOS Seismology TCS), and EarthScope (www.earthscope.org), met to coordinate joint developments to make the next-generation seismological data centers ready to address these challenges. This includes modern cloud-based storage systems, versatile formats for data and metadata, asynchronous data access, on-cloud processing, Quality Assurance (QA) and common Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI). This presentation will outline the envisioned framework, highlight progress in its various components, and present a roadmap for its realisation, to be coordinated within the FDSN over the coming years. It will also provide an opportunity for stakeholders - such as users, instrument manufacturers, data and service providers - to engage and shape the vision.