Archival Data

[WildWill]

Howdy All Y'all,

I saw a couple of posts about finding archival data. Data from SDO was one of them.

I just wanted to toss it out there that the first place to look is RIGHT HERE (under your nose, so to speak!).

As a quick aside - this site also maintains some pretty good help and FAQ...

I would encourage all y'all to take a little time, when ya have time, and just go through the menus - both on the front page and in the community area. 
There is a whole wealth of information right here...  check it out. I can promise you will learn something new if you do. 
 

Also, wherever you see an "I" in a little circle, you can click on it and it will pop up a little window with information about whatever it is that you are looking at.

 

In addition, last summer a new forum was created (Insightful Reading). This forum contains a great deal of very interesting and useful information.  There are some really good pieces written by folks right here. Newbie in particular has been the greatest contributor. Once again, I can promise you that if you check it out, you'll learn something new! If ya don't - then you already know it all anyway! lol. 
 

Seriously though. It is certainly with exploring. A couple of other pretty good places to check out are some of the sources of the data aggregated here. In particular, I find these to be most interesting and useful:

The home page for the Solar Dynamics Observatory 

sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov

The home page for the Space Weather Prediction Center operated by NOAA:

swpc.noaa.gov

The home page of the National Solar Observatory:

Gong.nap.edu

There are a lot of other sources of data out there, these are just a few that I like to use. 

If ya spend an hour exploring this website, or any of the three I listed, and you don't learn nuthin', well, feel free to come on down to the greatest country on the planet (that would be Texas) and shoot me!

All y'all have ya a nice day!

WnA

[Vancanneyt Sander]

33 minuten geleden, WildWill zei:

finding archival data

Our archive has data since 1996! That’s 25 years of solar and geomagnetic data. The archive contains: solar wind, IMF, x-ray, proton data; daily reports of activity, sunspot regions, solar flares, Kp and ap indices, coronal hole map (not since 1996).

if anyone wants to find strong geomagnetic storms, solar flares or proton events we have top 25/50 lists. Each top-list can be filtered per year and per solar cycle (how convenient!).

solar cycle information is on our special solar cycle progression page with several stats since 1996 based on our archived data. It also has a link to the solar cycle comparison page where you can view all solar cycles in one graph and where you can compare current cycle with any other cycle. So if you think this cycle will be so much stronger, compare it with SC23 for example 😜

SpaceWeatherLive is packed with loads of data and archive and is unique in its kind. I normally don’t brag about it but SWL has become big 🫣

[Christopher S.]

It's hard to knock the value of an independent entity which has compiled numerous scientific widgets sourced as directly as possible from official instruments and websites, which greatly enhance aurora viewing, data examination, cross-correllation, etc. endeavors. The archives here can be browsed quite seamlessly and there are plenty of links plugged-into the experience, so you can really dive deep into the history of our sun and geomagnetic activity.

[Sam Warfel]

5 hours ago, Christopher S. said:

It's hard to knock the value of an independent entity which has compiled numerous scientific widgets sourced as directly as possible from official instruments and websites, which greatly enhance aurora viewing, data examination, cross-correllation, etc. endeavors. The archives here can be browsed quite seamlessly and there are plenty of links plugged-into the experience, so you can really dive deep into the history of our sun and geomagnetic activity.

I see people say “Oh, i use SWPC/NOAA/etc./etc, it’s faster/official”, and yes, it may get the imagery quicker by a few minutes or less, but I’ve found I don’t really care about the time lag, nothing is that urgent. Plus, the time spent looking at lots of different tabs is saved by using SWL!  Not to mention, who can beat the design friendliness and readability, dark mode, etc. of SWL? So far, no one. And certainly not the official government websites. SWL gathers (almost, and always expanding) everything you need right under one roof.

I think it’s quite possible to be an expert space weather analyst or aurora chaser, and use (mostly) just SWL! It’s not a third-party app that’s just for beginners. 

Thanks for the amazing tool, Sander and Marcel. 

Edited January 18 by Sam Warfel

[Vancanneyt Sander]

6 uren geleden, Sam Warfel zei:

I see people say “Oh, i use SWPC/NOAA/etc./etc, it’s faster/official”, and yes, it may get the imagery quicker by a few minutes or less, but I’ve found I don’t really care about the time lag, nothing is that urgent.

There's a reason for that  if we wanna keep SWL speedy we have to cache several data. We also don't want to hammer our source servers (you know SDO image server for example can't handle large amount of traffic). Caching makes sure we can stay online when alerts go out, if we don't cache our server gets hammered by the thousands of visitors that visit us making it slower and eventually crash the server. So because of all caching we do, we keep SWL speedy, even with loads of traffic but as with all caching there's a slight delay. 

[Christopher S.]

On 1/18/2023 at 4:33 AM, Vancanneyt Sander said:

There's a reason for that  if we wanna keep SWL speedy we have to cache several data. We also don't want to hammer our source servers (you know SDO image server for example can't handle large amount of traffic). Caching makes sure we can stay online when alerts go out, if we don't cache our server gets hammered by the thousands of visitors that visit us making it slower and eventually crash the server. So because of all caching we do, we keep SWL speedy, even with loads of traffic but as with all caching there's a slight delay. 

I believe the degree of delay you're speaking of can only really be noticed by one on a high-end machine with decent-ish internet, so it falls well within what I'd call acceptable parameters