FDSN: get_waveforms vs get_waveforms_bulk

Usage Questions
1

I have a set of about 150 seismic stations from different FDSN clients from which I want to retrieve 60 s long waveforms. Most of them have 3 channels.

I am able to retrieve them by means of the client.get_waveforms function, but I was wondering if in this case would be quicker to use the get_waveforms_bulk function instead?

I can provide a JSON file with the stations from which I want to get the waveforms.

Cheers!

2

Using “bulk” download is much more efficient if requesting a large amount of stations because you avoid a lot of http overload compared to individual requests and it is a lot more efficient for the server side to prepare the data.

Documentation for the bulk requests should be pretty self explanatory. You can prepare a text file for the request or just put together your request in python: