Data Products at the IRIS DMC: Stepping Stones for Research and Other Applications

In 2010, the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Data Management Center (DMC) expanded the preexisting effort to generate, archive, and distribute data products derived from the extensive data archives of the center, which include the IRIS Program for Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere (PASSCAL), Global Seismographic Network (GSN), EarthScope, and many other data sources. This expansion included dedicating two new full‐time staff to data products and to the development of a new system to manage and distribute them. With community guidance provided by a data products working group (DPWG), DMC has developed a number of freely available unique and increasingly popular data products for the seismological community. In addition, DMC is also archiving and distributing other data products that are produced by community members. A complete list of data products managed by DMC is maintained here: http://www.iris.edu/dms/products. Many of these are available from the Searchable Product Depository (SPUD, http://www.iris.edu/spud), the DMC data product management system. Traditionally, data products result from specialized processing applied during research by the principal investigators and their teams. Products span the range of simple plots or animations derived from waveform data to highly refined models. Some waveform‐processing techniques (e.g., receiver functions) have gained wide community use and can be derived by widely accepted algorithms. Such first‐order data products make ideal candidates for routine generation to provide a standard for the user community. Data products are typically derived from raw data to serve as insightful summaries of the raw time series data, or as quality control metrics, or as foundations or stepping stones to more specialized products and research. The overall goal of the DMC data product effort is to produce and manage a variety of community‐approved and utilized data products that complement the raw data managed at the DMC and ultimately serve …