Heliophysics VxOs and Supporting Data Systems and Services I: Posters

SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]

SM23A ACC:Chichen-Itza Hall Tuesday

Presiding: M Weiss, JHU, Applied Physics Lab.; D Bilitza, Raytheon ITSS

SM23A-01

The Virtual Space Physics Observatory as a Portal to the Heliophysics Great Observatory

* Roberts, D A (aaron.roberts@nasa.gov), NASA GSFC, Code 672, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
King, J (jking@mail630.gsfc.nasa.gov), NASA GSFC, Code 672, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
King, J (jking@mail630.gsfc.nasa.gov), Perot Systems, Inc., 1801 Robert Fulton Dr, Reston, VA 20191, United States
Schmidt, J (joseph.schmidt@aquilent.com), Aquilent, 1100 West St., Laurel, MD 20707, United States
Cornwell, C (carl.cornwell@aquilent.com), Aquilent, 1100 West St., Laurel, MD 20707, United States
McGuire, R (robert.e.mcguire@nasa.gov), NASA GSFC, Code 672, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States

NASA's Virtual Space Physics Observatory (VSPO), now sponsored by the Space Physics Data Facility at GSFC, is an operational portal to most of the frequently accessed Space Physics datasets from current and past missions. It includes access to many relevant solar physics data products as well as some services (e.g., SSCWeb-based "quick orbits" and links to CCMC). The Web interface to the underlying gateway allows a user to search for data using criteria such as observation time, measurement type, resolution, observatory/spacecraft, and region of space observed. It is now directly based on the SPASE data model and can harvest new product descriptions and make both the descriptions and the products available immediately. VSPO provides direct links to data services such that plots and data subsets from CDAWeb or files from the Virtual Solar Observatory can be obtained directly through the VSPO interface. Direct machine access to datasets allows other applications to use VSPO to find and load data. Discipline specific VxOs and data center based data systems can provide greater functionality for particular datasets, but VSPO provides a simple route to a broad range of "Heliphysics Great Observatory" products. It is thus useful for a range of tasks, inlcuding browsing data from many missions and geophysical/solar indices, obtaining quick downloads of data and plots, finding the location of spacecraft, and determining what products are available in a given region of space. We will continue to add products, harvesting data descriptions from VxOs and working on obtaining access to as nearly a complete set of Space and Solar Phsyics datasets as possible.
http:vspo.gsfc.nasa.gov

SM23A-02

The Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory; access to and use of diverse solar and solar-terrestrial data

* Fox, P (pfox@ucar.edu), HAO/NCAR, PO Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307, United States

This presentation will demonstrate how users and other data providers can utilize the Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO) to find, access and use diverse data holdings from the disciplines of solar, solar-terrestrial and space physics. VSTO provides a web portal, web services and a native applications programming interface for various levels of users. Since these access methods are based on semantic web technologies and refer to the VSTO ontology, users also have the option of taking advantage of value added services when accessing and using the data. We present example of both conventional use of VSTO as well as the advanced semantics use. Finally, we present our future directions for VSTO and semantic data frameworks in general.
http:www.vsto.org

SM23A-03

VITMO: The Virtual Observatory for the ITM Community

Morrison, D (daniel.morrison@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
* Weiss, M (michele.weiss@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Daley, R (rose.daley@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Immer, L (lis.immer@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Colclough, C (Christopher.Colclough@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Holder, R (robert.holder@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Jen, J (julia.jen@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Hashemian, M (Mohammed.Hashemian@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Meckel, P (Phil.Meckel@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Potter, M (matthew.potter@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Barnes, R (robin.barnes@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Nylund, S (stu.nylund@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Yee, J (sam.yee@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Talaat, E (elsayed.talaat@jhuapl.edu), Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd., Laurel, MD 20723, United States
Russell, J (james.russell@hampton.edu), Hampton University, 23 Tyler St., Hampton, VA 23668, United States
Heelis, R (heelis@utdallas.edu), Univ. Texas at Dallas, Box 830688, Richardson, TX 75083, United States
Kozyra, J (jukozyra@engin.umich.edu), Univ. of Michigan, 2455 Hayward St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
Bilitza, D (bilitza@pop600.gsfc.nasa.gov), NASA Goddard, Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
McGuire, R (robert.e.mcguire@nasa.gov), NASA Goddard, Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
Candey, R (Robert.M.Candey@gsfc.nasa.gov), NASA Goddard, Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
Fox, P (pfox@ucar.edu), NCAR/HAO, PO Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307, United States

The Virtual ITM Observatory (VITMO) is one of the recently selected NASA domain specific virtual observatories designed to facilitate study of the ionosphere, thermosphere, and mesosphere (ITM) regions. The ITM domain studies an area of the atmosphere that is a transition region between the atmosphere and space, where many important physical and chemical processes change dramatically temporally and spatially. As a result, the areas of studies within the ITM community span a wide spectrum of scientific subjects in geophysics and space physics. The VITMO will sit above mission datacenters and provide outside users with the ability to find data sets across multiple datacenters and more importantly, find those datasets that overlap in time and/or space allowing coordinated observations of phenomena. This will create a "true virtual observatory" that utilizes many different instruments to study a given system or phenomena. The design incorporates a modular framework that accepts distributed data and services from across the community and encourages widespread participation. The current and planned state of the VITMO, which is to begin operation at the end of 2007, will be presented along with a demonstration of some of its unique capabilities.
http:vitmo.jhupl.edu

SM23A-04

Virtual Cosmic Ray Observatory (ViCRO)

Cooper, J F (John.F.Cooper@nasa.gov), Heliospheric Physics Laboratory, Code 672, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 29771, United States
McGuire, R E (Robert.E.McGuire@nasa.gov), Heliospheric Physics Laboratory, Code 672, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 29771, United States
Lal, N (Nand.Lal@nasa.gov), Heliospheric Physics Laboratory, Code 672, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 29771, United States
Szabo, A (Adam.Szabo@nasa.gov), Heliospheric Physics Laboratory, Code 672, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 29771, United States
Narock, T W (tom.narock@gsfc.nasa.gov), UMBC, Code 672, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
* Bilitza, D (dieter.bilitza.1@gsfc.nasa.gov), Raytheon ITSS, Code 672, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
Hill, M E (matt.hill@jhuapl.edu), Applied Physics Laboratory Johns Hopkins University, MP3-E128 11100 Johns Hopkins Rd, Laurel, MD 20723-6005, United States
Armstrong, T P (armstrong@ftecs.com), Fundamental Technologies, Suite A 2411 Ponderosa Drive, Lawrence, KS 66046-5073, United States
McKibben, R B (bruce.mckibben@unh.edu), University of New Hampshire, 39 College Rd., Durham, NH 03824, United States

The Virtual Cosmic Ray Observatory (ViCRO) is proposed to extend planned capabilities of NASA's existing and developing heliophysics virtual observatories with a collection of important cosmic ray datasets with an initial focus on interplanetary solar and heliospheric science applications. Recent work from the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and Voyager spacecraft shows the science value of intercalibrated flux and cumulative fluence spectra from multiple sensors with contiguous energy coverage. These data can be applied to investigation of solar flare and coronal mass ejection events, acceleration and transport of interplanetary particles within the inner heliosphere, cosmic ray interactions with planetary surfaces and atmospheres, sources of anomalous cosmic ray ions in the outer heliosphere, and solar cycle modulation of galactic cosmic rays. Data resources include operational and legacy missions with appropriate instruments throughout the heliosphere and geospace that provide relevant datasets for solar, heliospheric, and galactic cosmic ray particles. Core operational data sources include the Heliospheric Network (HN) spacecraft with ancillary data for spacecraft positions, solar modulation from ground-based neutron monitors, and event lists for solar and interplanetary activity. We will collaborate with HN data providers to ensure availability through a common middleware interface modeled on the Virtual Heliospheric Observatory to support the use of data by the heliophysics and other related research communities. We are exploring value-added services including an OMNIWeb-like interface for selected cosmic ray data sets and expanded graphical ephemeris support for HN missions on the model of SSCWeb for geospace spacecraft.

SM23A-05

A Newly Proposed Virtual Higher-Order Heliophysics Observatory [V(HO)²]

Fung, S F (shing.f.fung@nasa.gov), Laboratory for Heliospheric Physics, Code 672, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
* Bilitza, D (dieter.bilitza.1@gsfc.nasa.gov), Space Physics Data Facility, Code 672, Raytheon/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
Team, T V (shing.f.fung@nasa.gov)

With a number of nascent, discipline-oriented VxOs (including a VSO, VHO, VITMO, ViRBO and two VMOs) under earnest development, time is ripe to investigate how the VxO paradigm may be extended to support cross- disciplinary science that has been the hallmark of Sun-Earth system science research. This presentation introduces a newly proposed Virtual Higher-Order Heliophysics Observatory [V(HO)²] to support global-scale (cross-disciplinary) Heliophysics research that require analysis of diverse datasets and models from different Heliophysics disciplines. The proposed coordinated effort will develop the V(HO)² to enable complex data queries with joint data conditioning, i.e., with filtering by context, content and/or region conditions. The higher- order querying capabilities will allow the generation of event lists for studying groups or classes of events with similar data features, and for studying relationships between events in separate regions (e.g., vortices in the magnetopause and spirals/pearls in the aurora). To support analyses of large-scale problems, such as in sun- solar wind, solar wind-magnetosphere or magnetosphere-ionosphere couplings, the V(HO)² will develop mechanisms to query different VxOs simultaneously, sequentially or iteratively to locate different pertinent discipline-data granules. To address the research challenges confronting the Heliophysics community, the V(HO)² will have the design objectives to: (1) enable solving new, global problems, (2) access diverse datasets and services, (3) enable wide-ranging (context-based and content-based) search capabilities to allow users to generate event lists and find related data (by context, content and/or location) of a particular event or groups of events, and (4) allow researchers to rapidly gain integrated views from the solar origin to the terrestrial effects of an event. The V(HO)² will collaborate with all existing VxOs, active Heliophysics data archives (e.g., the NASA SPDF) and future VxOs to develop seamless communications interfaces, and to develop uniform querying protocols to facilitate content-based search capabilities and to access the data files that fall within the time ranges generated by data searches.

SM23A-06

Magnetospheric Data Discovery and Access

* Merka, J (jan.merka@gsfc.nasa.gov), University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, United States
* Merka, J (jan.merka@gsfc.nasa.gov), NASA/GSFC, Code 672, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
King, T A (tking@igpp.ucla.edu), Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90064-1567, United States
Narock, T W (tom.narock@gsfc.nasa.gov), University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, United States
Narock, T W (tom.narock@gsfc.nasa.gov), NASA/GSFC, Code 672, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
Walker, R J (rwalker@igpp.ucla.edu), Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90064-1567, United States
Joy, S P (sjoy@igpp.ucla.edu), Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90064-1567, United States

Magnetospheric data are provided by a variety of diverse sources and the data is generally not provided in the same format, nor with the same level of documentation. The Virtual Magnetospheric Observatory (VMO), a joint effort of scientists at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and UCLA, aims to provide the scientific community with an integrated access to well documented data and related services. In this presentation we will demonstrate current and upcoming features of the VMO, important to both end-users and data providers. The primary function of the VMO is to search for available data sets matching user-specified criteria and to return links to matching data. The query submission process and its results will be demonstrated. In order to compare and search different data sets, they are described using the standard SPASE data model. We have developed tools for creating resource descriptions and for managing them in registries. Such tools simplify metadata preparation for the data providers to participate in the VMO. We will also discuss VMO value-added services (e.g., formatting, subsetting, display data, data mining).
http:vmo.nasa.gov

SM23A-07

VOregistry and VOgrid: Tools For An Integrated Heliophysics Data Environment

* Narock, T (tom.narock@gsfc.nasa.gov), Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, United States
* Narock, T (tom.narock@gsfc.nasa.gov), Goddard Space Flight Center, Heliospheric Physics Laboratory, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
Szabo, A (adam.szabo@nasa.gov), Goddard Space Flight Center, Heliospheric Physics Laboratory, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
Merka, J (jan.merka@gsfc.nasa.gov), Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, United States
Merka, J (jan.merka@gsfc.nasa.gov), Goddard Space Flight Center, Heliospheric Physics Laboratory, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States

As the Heliophysics data environment expands with Virtual Observatories (VO) and value-added services the user is left with a proliferation of choices and options. While each discipline will have a focused VO, today's research often involves cross-discipline and global large-scale studies. As such, making sense of the vast amount of data and services can be daunting. We introduce two unique but related tools to aid in the discovery and use of data and services. First, VOregistry is an attempt to register the services offered by VOs and also those offered independently throughout Heliophysics. Such a registry can aid researchers through its web interface as they search to see where and how to access a particular type of analysis or data. Additionally, the programming interface will allow VOs and other services to query for services they can not offer and redirect users. The second tool, VOgrid uses grid technologies to offer a place to house and expose analysis code as services. Its aim is to offer a confederation of computational resources that can be pooled to offer community contributed software from developers unable to maintain production services and provide management, scheduling and execution of these services. Together, VOregistry's lookup service and VOgrid's execution options can make both a human's and machine's use of the Heliophysics data environment easier and more efficient.

SM23A-08

Heliospheric Data Access Through, and Functionalities of, GSFC/SPDF's OMNIWeb, COHOWeb and FTPBrowser

* Papitashvili, N E (natasha@mail630.gsfc.nasa.gov), Space Physics Data Facility and Perot Systems, Inc., NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
King, J H (jking@mail630.gsfc.nasa.gov), Space Physics Data Facility and Perot Systems, Inc., NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States

OMNIWeb provides access to hourly resolution near-Earth solar wind magnetic field and plasma data for 1963 to near-current. Cross-normalized data from each of many spacecraft are used. Very recently, OMNIWeb began providing access to 1-min and 5-min versions of OMNI data for 1995 to near-current, based on ACE, Wind and IMP 8 data shifted to the Earth's bow shock nose by a combination of minimum variance and cross product techniques applied to ~15-s magnetic field data. The spacecraft-specific 1-min data are also OMNIWeb- accessible. COHOWeb provides access to hourly resolution solar wind magnetic field and plasma data from each of many deep space spacecraft (Voyagers, Pioneers, Ulysses, Helios) and to the OMNI data near Earth. Data have been uniformized in content, format and coordinate system usage. FTPBrowser provides access to many tens of higher resolution heliospheric magnetic field, plasma and energetic particle data sets. These interfaces provide baseline functionalities of time span selection and subsetting by physical parameter, with plot, list and file creation options. In addition, many data sets also have scatter plot, linear regression fitting and cross correlation coefficient (CCC) determination capabilities, while some have distribution function and statistics (means, medians, etc.) capabilities. For the latter two, filtering by any parameters in the records enables study of dependences of CCF's, means, etc. on other variables. VxO's have the options of identifying and/or otherwise exploiting these value-added interfaces in response to relevant user queries and of identifying and possibly retrieving the corresponding FTP-accessible ASCII files.

SM23A-09

The Michigan Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF) Graphical User Interface

* De Zeeuw, D (darrens@umich.edu), University of Michigan, 2455 Hayward St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2143, United States
Gombosi, T (tamas@umich.edu), University of Michigan, 2455 Hayward St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2143, United States
Toth, G (gtoth@umich.edu), University of Michigan, 2455 Hayward St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2143, United States
Ridley, A (ridley@umich.edu), University of Michigan, 2455 Hayward St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2143, United States

The Michigan Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF) is a powerful tool available for the community that has been used to model from the Sun to Earth and beyond. As a research tool, however, it still requires user experience with parallel compute clusters and visualization tools. Thus, we have developed a graphical user interface (GUI) that assists with configuring, compiling, and running the SWMF, as well as visualizing the model output. This is accomplished through a portable web interface. Live examples will be demonstrated and visualization of several archived events will be shown.