About the NCEDC

The Northern California Earthquake Data Center (NCEDC) is the permanent archive and distribution center for various types of digital data relating to earthquakes in central and northern California. Time series data come from broadband, short period, and strong motion seismic sensors, GPS, and other geophysical sensors.

The NCEDC is a joint project of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory (BSL) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) at Menlo Park. The NCEDC also provides support for earthquake processing and archiving activities of the Northern California Seismic System (NCSS), a component of the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN).

If you use data from the NCEDC, we ask that you acknowledge both the NCEDC and the organizations that contributed the data.


Northern California Earthquake Catalog Search

The NCEDC provides online search capabilities for the northern California earthquake catalogs of the USGS and BSL.

Query for Waveform Station and Channel Inventory

Through SeismiQuery, you may check the inventory of the NCEDC, seeing what stations or channels are available for different time periods.

Access Continuous Waveform Data

NCEDC web services are the newest and preferred way for users to query and retrieve information from the NCEDC. These services provide simple functions that can be used from a web browser, command-line programs such as curl and wget, and through programming languages such as perl, python, shell scripts, or MATLAB.