SeismicPortal Earthquake Parameter Catalogues
The fdsnws-event service contains two earthquake parameter catalogues; the main being the EMSC-RTS catalogue that is continuously updated with new earthquakes.
The catalogue can be queried fot sets of seismic event parameters encoded in json, quakeml or csv via the SeismicPortal FDSN Event API
Recent data comes directly from the EMSC earthquake catalogue (EMSC-RTS) almost in real-time. This dataset is continuously updated with new earthquake origins within a few minutes of their occurrence. Publication to this webservice's catalogue occurs when earthquake parameters reach a certain threshold of confidence which may delay publication by a few minutes with respect to the results visible on EMSC's main site. The earthquake parameters in the catalogue may also fluctuate over the first few days following the earthquake as the parameters are refined; although values will normally rapidly stabilise in the first few hours and often in the first few minutes. This is the primary catalogue for the FDSN-event service; starting in 2004-01-01 it contains over 1 million earthquakes worldwide. Its geographic coverage is not uniform but it has improved progressively year on year, in addition to improvements to the coverage of smaller magnitude events.
The European-Mediterranean seismic bulletin is an older earthquake parameter catalogue (EMSC-EMB) that covers the period 1998-01-01 to 2013-08-28. When querying the service for results before 2014, there may well be duplicated results due to the two catalogues unless a particular catalogue is explicitly requested. This catalogue was more thoroughly checked for correctness and completeness and wasn't published in realtime but only later after validation; in 2013 this task was handed over to the International Seismological Centre Bulletin.