[webservices] units in quakeml/event ws

[Chad Trabant]

Hi Philip,

This is a bug.  We will fix this in our soon-to-be-released FDSN event web service.  We will probably not change the current behavior of the production service as there are likely dependencies on how we are generating it now.

Thanks for reporting it.  Somewhat surprising that it took this long to get noticed.

Chad

On Mar 13, 2013, at 11:41 AM, Philip Crotwell <crotwell at seis.sc.edu> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> The quakeml spec (1.2) says that this depth field in an origin is in meters.
> 
> depth Depth of hypocenter with respect to the nominal sea level given by the WGS84 geoid (Earth Gravitational Model, EGM96, Lemoine et al. 1998). Positive values indicate hypocenters below sea level. For shallow hypocenters, the depth value can be negative. Note: Other standards use different conventions for depth measurement. As an example, GSE2.0, defines depth with respect to the local surface. If event data is converted from other formats to QuakeML, depth values may have to be modified accordingly.
> 
> Unit: m
> 
> 
> But when I query the event ws, the values that come back look like they are in kilometers, ie 33 instead of 33000 like in this:
> 
> <origin publicID="smi:www.iris.edu/ws/event/query?originId=4908125" iris:contributor="NEIC PDE-M" iris:catalog="NEIC PDE"><time><value>1999-08-17T15:06:27.0700</value></time><creationInfo><author>NEIC</author></creationInfo><latitude><value>34.814</value></latitude><longitude><value>32.859</value></longitude><depth><value>33.0</value></depth></origin>
> 
> 
> QuakeML doesn't have a "units" field, so it can't just be labeled as "m" or "km".
> 
> Is this a bug, or is the iris ws just choosing to not follow the spec? 
> 
> thanks
> Philip
> _______________________________________________
> webservices mailing list
> webservices at iris.washington.edu
> http://www.iris.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/webservices

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.iris.washington.edu/pipermail/webservices/attachments/20130313/ef64265d/attachment.htm>