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Tutorial: Discover and Download Bulk-release Strain Files

In this tutorial we will browse and download GWOSC bulk-release data for specified time intervals.

If you want to analyze strain data around a particular GW event from a catalog, please visit the Event Portal.

Tutorials in this series:

Discover strain files using the web interface

Let us assume there was a known astrophysical event—for example, a gamma-ray burst—and we are interested in gravitational-wave data near the time of the event.

As an example, let's suppose the event occurred at 2015-09-19T00:00:00 UTC and we are interested in a 10 seconds interval around it.

  1. Most tools and pages on GWOSC.org use GPS time, so the first thing we should do is to convert our UTC time into GPS time. We can do so using the GPS converter tool and we'll find out that the GPS time is 1126656017. Our interval of interest will be [1126656012, 1126656022].

  2. To get the data files, let's navigate to the bulk-release data page. From the options there, let's choose the O1 Data 16 KHz release, which contains the time and date we're interested in.

  3. Fill out the interval of interest [1126656012, 1126656022] in the "Start Time" and "End Time" fields, select the detector and select "Time series data in HDF5 and Frame files" output option.

  4. You should have been redirected to a page with only one file entry. The only thing left to do is to choose the file format (HDF5 or GW Frame) from the table to download it (~500 MB).