Space Physics Research Environment: Meeting the Challenges of Integrating Disparate Data Systems IV Posters
Presiding: M Weiss, Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University; R J Walker, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and Department of Earth and Space Science, University of California, Los Angeles
SH51B-01 0830h
The SAMPEX Data Center and User Interface for the SEC Community
The Solar, Anomalous, Magnetospheric Particle Explorer (SAMPEX) was the first of NASA's Small Explorer (SMEX) series. SAMPEX was launched July 3, 1992 into a 520 by 670 km orbit at 82 degrees inclination. SAMPEX carries four instruments designed to study energetic particles of solar, interplanetary, and magnetospheric origin, as well as "anomalous" and galactic cosmic rays. As an outcome of the Senior Review process, the NASA SAMPEX science mission ended on June 30, 2004, leaving a 12-year continuous record of observations. (The spacecraft and instruments are still operating and returning science data for a 1-year trial period under a partnership between NASA and the Aerospace Corporation). SAMPEX was launched before the development of the WWW and implementation of NASA's open data policy. This, and the complexity of the data analysis have made it difficult for the general community to make full use of the SAMPEX science data set. The SAMPEX Data Center will remedy the situation. The data center set-up and operation is funded for 3 years by NASA. The goals of the data center are to enable community access to the full SAMPEX data set by developing an up-to-date, flexible web-based system, and to provide for the eventual permanent archiving of this version of the SAMPEX data set at the NSSDC. Knowledgeable members of the SAMPEX science team are preparing the data, and members of the ACE Science Center at Caltech are involved in developing the data distribution pipeline and user interface. The system is modeled in part on the ACE Science Center, but enhanced to accommodate the more-complex SAMPEX data set. We will describe the current status of the SAMPEX Data Center development, the user interface, and the contents of the data that will be made available.
http://www.srl.caltech.edu/ACE/ASC/sampex
SH51B-02 0830h
Science Data Processing of the Solar EUV Irradiance for the SDO EVE Instrument
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is the first mission of NASA's Living With a Star (LWS) program. The satellite will be launched in 2008 into a geosynchronous orbit, allowing for almost continuous solar observations, and has a planned mission of at least five years. One of the instruments on SDO is the Extreme ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE). EVE will measure the solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectral irradiance from 0.1 to 105 nm, plus hydrogen Lyman-α (121.6 nm) at a 10-second time cadence. The output of the Sun at these wavelengths is highly variable on timescales of minutes (solar flares), to months (solar rotations), to years (solar cycle), and even longer. The EVE spectral irradiance data, along with the other SDO solar images, will be used to study this variability and its sources, to improve models of solar irradiance, and to understand the impact of irradiance variability on the geospace environment. A major thrust of the EVE program is the improvement of solar data products for space weather operations. Near real-time products will be produced within fifteen minutes and will be used in NOAA operational atmospheric models that specify the space environment and to assist in forecasting for space weather operations. Many of the EVE data processing algorithms are inherited from the data processing of the solar UV irradiance by the TIMED Solar EUV Experiment (SEE), which has been operating since January 2002. The EVE data system has the additional challenges associated with a continuous data stream, high data rate of 7 Mbps, and producing near real-time data products. The solutions for these challenges are discussed for the EVE data system.
SH51B-03 0830h
SORCE Solar Irradiance Data Products
The SORCE Science Data System produces Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) and Spectral Solar Irradiance (SSI) data products on a daily basis, which are formulated using measurements from the four primary instruments on board the SORCE spacecraft. The TIM instrument provides measurements of the TSI, whereas the SIM, SOLSTICE, and XPS instruments collectively provide measurements of the solar irradiance spectrum from 1 nm to 3000 nm (excluding 31-115nm, which is covered by the TIMED SEE experiment). The Science Data System utilizes raw spacecraft and instrument telemetry, calibration data, and other ancillary information to produce a variety of data products that have been corrected for all known instrumental and operational factors. Since launch of the SORCE spacecraft in January 2003, science processing algorithms have continued to mature, and "Level 3" data products are routinely being produced and delivered to the public via the SORCE web site and the Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC). This poster provides an overview of the SORCE data processing system, summarizes the present state of the processing algorithms and the quality of the current SORCE data products, and provides details on how to access SORCE science data.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce
SH51B-04 0830h
Designing Data Services for the SDO AIA/HMI Joint Science Operations Center
The Joint Science Operations Center (JSOC) is designed to provide data capture, archive, analysis, and distribution functions for both the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager and the Atmospheric Imaging Array on the Solar Dynamics Observatory. These instruments are notable for the large quantity of raw data they will generate, more than doubling the total volume of all existing solar data in the first few months alone. In addition, the JSOC will be required to handle a larger component of higher-level data products than most previous missions. The fundamental concept of the JSOC architecture is that the metadata and bulk image data are stored separately, not being combined until the time of use or export. This enables all metadata to be rapidly accessible through a relational database. It permits flexible organization of the data into virtual data sets or series, and the use of an abstracted syntax, such as a URL, for data description and querying. Furthermore, data organization details dictated by the requirements of efficient mass storage can be hidden from the user. Multiple classes of access to the processing and data are envisioned, ranging from production pipeline modules generating standard mission products to workstation users analyzing self-contained data products exported from the archive. The JSOC design provides a rich set of primitives upon which VSO-like services can be built, and should allow us to provide a unified view of the data and data services to all classes of users.
http://rick.stanford.edu/pubs/spd05/jsoc/
SH51B-05 0830h
Building a Virtual Solar Observatory: Lessons Learned
Two years into its development, the VSO has emerged from a drawing board concept into a full-fledged data query and data delivery system serving the Solar Physics community. Throughout its development, the VSO has lived up to its `small box' motto and has built light-weight servers that can easily run on a desktop or laptop. The two basic functions of the VSO are data query and data delivery. For these functions, the VSO servers act like switchboards, dispatching query/data requests to relevant data providers. More important, these servers present an abstraction that integrates diverse data archives, thus reducing complexity. The design of the VSO has evolved during its implementation in response to difficulties and user feedback. We discuss the changes in areas such as the data model, user interface, and performance. These lessons should be of interest to people designing and building other virtual observatories. We also discuss challenges and opportunities we foresee as the VSO becomes a significant and enabling research tool.
http://rick.stanford.edu/pubs/spd05/vso/
SH51B-06 0830h
The Joy of Searching, Assembling and Applying Eclectic Data Sets for Dating Pre-space Era Solar Proton Events
Scientific technology has advanced with lightening speed since the advent of routine space measurements in 1965. The miniaturization of spacecraft electronics, an advantage to experimenters, has challenged modelers to provide accurate assessments of the environment so that spacecraft equipment will continue to function throughout major solar-terrestrial perturbations. A question frequently asked is "How large can an event be?" The impulsive nitrate increases in polar ice cores provide a proxy for identifying major solar proton fluence events in the past. However, in order to date these impulsive nitrate events, records from a variety of geophysical phenomena are necessary. These include dates of major volcanic eruptions, large geomagnetic storms, and mid-latitude aurora. In addition a knowledge of the historic geomagnetic field is necessary simply to define "mid latitude". These data have been accumulated from many sources ranging from an assembly of aurora from the Korean Chronicles to identifying volcano eruptions listed on an IAVCEI calendar. An example of how these disparate records have been used to identify major solar proton fluence events over the past 400 years will be presented. These records have confirmed the date of a solar proton event with a greater than 30 MeV fluence four times the largest fluence event recorded in the space era.
SH51B-07 0830h
Modeling Services at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center
The Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) has as one of its functions the provision of research community access to modern space science models. For this purpose, CCMC hosts a set of state-of-the-art space science models ranging from the solar atmosphere to the Earth's upper atmosphere. The majority of models residing at CCMC are comprehensive computationally intensive physics-based models. CCMC provides a web-based Run-on-Request (RoR) system, by which the interested scientist can readily request simulations of science problems. To allow the models to be driven by data relevant to particular events CCMC developed on-line data file generation tool that automatically download data from data providers and transform them to required format. CCMC also provides a tailored web-based visualization interface for the model output, as well as the capability to download to the user simulation output directly. CCMC is working on additional options of model results representation tailored for easy comparison with observation data. Community feedback is invited to our ongoing efforts to further improve services.
http://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov
SH51B-08 0830h
Issues important for the inclusion of model output into geophysical databases
The increasing importance of modeling for the interpretation of geophysical observations has led to the need to make the simulation results easily accessible and widely disseminated. In fact, it is widely recognized that models are essential to the success of any space or groundbased research program, often referred to as an additional "instrument". The treatment of the outputs from geophysical models will vary according to the models' complexity - from simple one-dimensional steady state to complex three dimensional time dependent models. The usefulness of this output depends on the quantity and temporal and spatial scales of the phenomena simulated. In this paper, we discuss the particular issues relevant to ionosphere, thermosphere, and mesosphere studies for current modeling capabilities and programmatic environment. Specifically, we will address the practical considerations to include current model output in existing and geophysical databases including virtual observatories.
SH51B-09 0830h
Comparison of Magnetic Activity and Ionospheric Total Electron Content in Polar Regions
The poorly understood complex dynamics of ionospheric irregularities and structures such as the auroral oval are among the primary limitations for empirical ionosphere models. The accuracy in the prediction of ionospheric effects is therefore limited, and it leads to a wide variety of problems regarding scientific studies and applications, including communication, remote sensing, surveillance, navigation and climate change research. However, a variety of currently available space geodetic sensors, have substantially improved the empirical modeling of ionospheric Total Electron Content (TEC) from various ground- and space-based observations. These include the GPS derived Global Ionosphere Maps (GIMs) generated by the mapping of the slant radar signals (L-band) from satellite (20,000 km) to the global ground receiver station network at each receivers' zenith direction, LEOs (400 km-1300 km, in the F and H ionosphere regions) carrying GPS receivers, and CHAMP (450 km) magnetometer observations. In this paper we compare the measured TEC at high latitudes to the spatial and temporal variations in the polar external field and to disturbances in surface magnetic observatories. In particular, the TEC will be compared to the Polar Cap Index (PCI), an index generally accepted in recent years as a good indicator of high latitude magnetic activity and related ionospheric dynamics. Moreover, the selection of satellite orbits for magnetic anomaly analyses is usually based on global ground planetary magnetic indices, and these indices show poor correlation with local disturbances at satellite altitude for polar regions. Comparison of magnetic indices and observatory data to the spatial and temporal variation in polar external fields extracted from orbital measurements, will provide improved constraints on satellite data selection.
SH51B-10 0830h
Shock and Discontinuities Analysis Tool (SDAT)
We have developed an analysis/visualization tool to study shocks and other discontinuities from satellite observations of plasma and magnetic field data. The tool uses an extension of the Viñas-Scudder analysis method based on the Rankine-Hugoniot conservation equations and published in JGR (1985). SDAT provides shock parameters such as the normal components n, shock speed Us, angle between the normal and the upstream magnetic field ΘBn, Alfvén and magnetosonic Mach numbers, deHoffman-Teller velocity and many other important shock parameters to describe the shock . SDAT was developed fully in IDL. As currently configured, SDAT reads ASCII data from any space mission for the analysis. All data displays and graphics generated by SDAT are written in Postcript and a summary of the analysis is generated as an ASCII file. The input plasma (ρ, V, Tp and Te) and magnetic field (B) data is read from different files at their own native resolution. The tool allows for data zooming in time and the input data can be in any coordinate system. Examples of real satellite data are included to facilitate the learning process in the usage of the tool. This tool is available to the space physics community. As configured, the tool is basically complete for shock analysis; however, work continues to generalize SDAT for the analysis of other types of discontinuities.
SH51B-11 0830h
The Radar Software Toolkit: Anaylsis software for the ITM community
The Radar Software Toolkit is a collection of data analysis, modelling and visualization tools originally developed for the SuperDARN project. It has evolved over the years into a robust, multi-platform software toolkit for working with a variety of ITM data sets including data from the Polar, TIMED and ACE spacecraft, ground based magnetometers, Incoherrent Scatter Radars, and SuperDARN. The toolkit includes implementations of the Altitude Adjusted Coordinate System (AACGM), the International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF), SGP4 and a set of coordinate transform functions. It also includes a sophisticated XML based data visualization system. The toolkit is written using a combination of ANSI C, Java and the Interactive Data Language (IDL) and has been tested on a variety of platforms.
http://superdarn.jhuapl.edu/devel/software/
SH51B-12 0830h
SPDF Science Data Infrastructure Supporting VxOs
The Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) at NASA GSFC has developed a strong foundation in space science mission services and data for enhancing the scientific return of space physics research and enabling integration of these services into the emerging NASA Virtual Observatory paradigm. Our vision is that distributed components of a space physics virtual observatory work together via standard interfaces and metadata agreements to form a globally unified system, comparable to a single super-instrument from a multi-mission ensemble of many data sources. Such a unitary (but not monolithic) view presents geophysical measurements and models across time and space, enabling researchers to easily and seamlessly analyze data from many more sources than possible before. We are providing a critical set of foundation components, leveraging our data format expertise and our existing and very popular science and orbit data web-based services, such as Coordinated Data Analysis Web (CDAWeb) and Satellite Situation Center Web (SSCweb). We have added web services for orbit location, data finding across FTP sites and in CDAWeb, data file format translation, and display. These services can now tie together existing data holdings, standardize and simplify their use, and enable much enhanced interoperability and data analysis.
http://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/
SH51B-13 0830h
The Self-Organized Archive: SPASE, PDS and Archive Cooperatives
Information systems with high quality metadata enable uses and services which often go beyond the original purpose. There are two types of metadata: annotations which are items that comment on or describe the content of a resource and identification attributes which describe the external properties of the resource itself. For example, annotations may indicate which columns are present in a table of data, whereas an identification attribute would indicate source of the table, such as the observatory, instrument, organization, and data type. When the identification attributes are collected and used as the basis of a search engine, a user can constrain on an attribute, the archive can then self-organize around the constraint, presenting the user with a particular view of the archive. In an archive cooperative where each participating data system or archive may have its own metadata standards, providing a multi-system search engine requires that individual archive metadata be mapped to a broad based standard. To explore how cooperative archives can form a larger self-organized archive we will show how the Space Physics Archive Search and Extract (SPASE) data model will allow different systems to create a cooperative and will use Planetary Data System (PDS) plus existing space physics activities as a demonstration.
SH51B-14 0830h
Conceptual Design of a Generalized Complex Science Resource Query System For Virtual Observatories
With the growth of NASA mission data centers, there is increased interest in 'virtual observatories', which will provide homogeneous access to heterogeneous resources such as distributed and disparate scientific datasets, models, and tools. A common selling point of the virtual observatory concept is that of providing complex query mechanisms that would not be possible within the current data environment. An example of such a query is: 'what are the solar wind and geophysical indices when at least three near-Earth orbiters are simultaneously observing the auroral region?' As new information discovery and retrieval capabilities are being developed under virtual observatory programs, here we build on those capabilities to design a general mechanism to specify and execute complex, multi-step scientific queries. In our design, complex queries are constructed from a series of smaller processing components that provide data creation (e.g., calculators, models), data retrieval, data conversion (e.g., units, coordinate systems, formats), and data integration (e.g., plotting, analysis) capabilities. Each component resource must be sufficiently well defined via metadata (specifying inputs, processing, outputs) to enable its use as a building block in constructing complex, scientific queries from high-level user requests.
SH51B-15 0830h
Integrating Complex Services into Future Virtual Observatories
One of the key capabilities that is required for Virtual Observatories for the ITM and other domains is the integration of high-level services such as search services into their design. Future systems need to work cross-mission and possibly cross-domain, and as Virtual Observatories from one domain tie into the Virtual Observatories of other domains, many possible levels of integration may be required. In addition, as the proliferation of Web Services continues, more and more powerful science capabilities are rapidly becoming easily available. These new capabilities go well beyond the garden variety `get me data' types of services, and should be fully integrated in order to exploit their full potential. Here we present the integration of several types of services into a prototype Virtual Observatory (VO). Key to this demonstration is the integration of an external search engine to enhance the native search capabilities of the VO. We utilize the Scientific Resource Access System (SRAS), http://sras.jhuapl.edu, which we have developed for accessing multidiscipline and cross-domain data sets from a wide variety of data servers. The enhanced search services come from the Space Physics Data Markup Language (SPDML) web site, http://sd-www.jhuapl.edu/SPDML; a prototype system for a metadata rich standard method for expressing Space Physics datasets utilizing XML. This integration shows the high-level integration necessary for connecting together domain specific Virtual Observatories. In addition, we demonstrate a wide variety of other levels of connectivity that a typical VO must employ to find and deliver data to the user.
http://sras.jhuapl.edu and http://sd-www.jhuapl.edu/SPDML
SH51B-16 0830h
Developing Architectural Alternatives and Best Practices in Cooperating Registry/Repositories for Application to Space Science
The development of interoperable systems for observation data and model-result interchange can be understood as the need for interoperability among various types and scales of repositories and data discovery/handling/processing/visualization applications used by researchers. Further, the repository systems and researcher applications can be viewed as services that need to be managed and coupled. These services will evolve with a significant degree of independence in the Space Science environment. The requirement to obtain and maintain an acceptable level of interoperability and cooperation among these autonomous and physically distributed systems poses a significant challenge to obtaining and maintaining interoperable Space Science systems. This paper will identify and define several important dimensions for the characterization of Cooperating Space Information Systems. These dimensions will leverage the discussion within the ISO Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) and will include but not be limited to: Degree of centralization of metadata, data and processing service, the cost of joining or leaving the cooperating system, degree of node autonomy, the value and cost of adding semantic services, scalability and degree of schema heterogeneity. Several lead edge implementations of cooperating information systems will be characterized using the defined dimensions. The conclusions and lessons learned will be discussed from the standpoint of Cooperating Space Science systems.