Retirement of the irisws-flinnengdahl web service

EarthScope Data Services will be retiring the irisws-flinnengdahl web service as a part of our effort to refine the NSF National Geophysical Facility’s portfolio of data and metadata access capabilities in the cloud.

What: Retirement of https://service.iris.edu/irisws/flinnengdahl/2/

When: On or after July 06, 2026

The Flinn-Engdahl webservice returns the Flinn-Engdahl region code, or region name, or both for a specified latitude and longitude. Since its introduction in 2011, the service has seen only moderate use and primarily from ObsPy, which includes a built-in alternative for over 10 years. Given the usage and available alternatives we are retiring this service

Alternatives

For those that want access to Flinn-Engdahl region lookups:

The obspy.geodetics module provides an option for FE regions for Python.
EMSC/EPOS has a queryable web service that might be a good option.
The EMSC/EPOS website also offers a nice interactive interface for FE regions.

For those that want other options:

Mapbox Geocoding API (online free tier allowing 100K requests/month)
OpenCage Geocoder (2500 free requests per day)
reverse_geocoder (A localized python solution that makes use of a GeoNames in-memory K-Dimensional tree.)

earthscope.org

EarthScope

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Jun 17, 2026, 11:12:01 AMJun 17

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Retirement of the irisws-flinnengdahl web service

Our fdsnws-station web service, the primary source of station metadata for our seismological repository, is moving from service.iris.edu to service.earthscope.org as part of our cloud transition.

We've worked to make this transition seamless, but if you encounter issues please contact he...@earthscope.org.

The service documentation contains the most up-to-date information regarding changes to the service.

Phased rollout

The transition will take place in two phases:

Soft launch (17 June, 2026) — The service becomes available at its new location, https://service.earthscope.org/fdsnws/station/1/. The existing service at service.iris.edu continues to operate unchanged during this transition period, allowing users to test and migrate to the new endpoint at their convenience.
Redirect (29 June, 2026) — Requests to https://service.iris.edu/fdsnws/station/1/ will redirect to https://service.earthscope.org/fdsnws/station/1/. The vast majority of web software follow these redirects automatically or can be configured to do so.

Breaking changes and additional capabilities in the new service

Along with the move, the new service includes the following changes:

Availability removed — The new service no longer supports the inclusion of data availability. The includeavailability and matchtimeseries parameters are no longer supported and will return an HTTP 410 Gone response if these parameters are submitted.
New resp output format — The format=resp output is fully compatible with the dedicated irisws-resp (https://service.iris.edu/irisws/resp/1/) service. Requires level=response.
New sacpz output format — The format=sacpz output is fully compatible with the dedicated irisws-sacpz (https://service.iris.edu/irisws/sacpz/1/) service.

Future consolidation of the resp and sacpz services

Over time, the fdsnws-station service will become the single source for these products, replacing the standalone “irisws” services:

level=response&output=resp will ultimately replace the irisws-resp service (https://service.iris.edu/irisws/resp/1/).
level=response&output=sacpz will ultimately replace the irisws-sacpz service (https://service.iris.edu/irisws/sacpz/1/).

More details for client developers and power users

We recommend that client developers and power users update any hard-coded references to point to the new endpoint at https://service.earthscope.org/fdsnws/station/1 rather than relying on the redirect from the old location.

Please reach out to he...@earthscope.org if you have any questions or run into trouble with this new service.

EarthScope

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Jun 17, 2026, 11:22:03 AMJun 17

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Apologies — the subject here should read "The fdsnws-station web service is moving". This is not related to Monday's announcement about this irisws-flinnengdahl service.