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Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. News
  3. Data
  4. Resources
  5. General VO Resources
  6. Active Projects
  7. FAQ

1 Introduction

The Data section below has a complete list of available data. Many previously inaccessible data sets are now available and we plan to continuously add new tools, data sets, and services of interest to radiation belt scientists. If you have any suggestions, requests, or questions, email them to virbo@virbo.org.

ViRBO Status

This is the version 1.0 alpha release of ViRBO. The "alpha" designation means that the infrastructure of the VxO is nearly complete.

In general, many ViRBO web pages are functional. Some features are not available for all data sets. To see an example of a data set with all of the possible features enabled (except the fully enabled data subsetting and filtering server), please see the SPIDR/AMIE page. The features that are not available are listed in the Development Notes section on the page associated with each data product. A more complete list of pending projects is listed in the Active Projects section.

About ViRBO

ViRBO (Virtual Radiation Belt Observatory) is one of the domain-specific virtual observatories that began operations in Fall, 2006 and is funded under the NASA Heliophysics Data Environment program. ViRBO provides access to data products and services related to Earth's radiation belt. As part of this project, we have developed or extended a number of existing software codebases. These codebases have cross-VxO uses, and we are developing them to be freely re-usable by data providers and other virtual observatories.

2 News

Old (and searchable) news items are available at http://virbo.org/meta/catalogue.do?source=News

If you have a news item, please send it to http://groups.google.com/group/virbo. If you have write permission, you may add it directly to one of the sections at http://virbo.org/meta/catalogue.do?source=News.

For more information on keeping up-to-date, see this document: [1].

Meetings

  • Fall, 2009: We are planning a meeting to identify future high-priority activities of ViRBO. An announcement will be made to the SPA Newsletter and the GEM Space Radiation Climatology Focus Group email list given at http://virbo.org/GEMFG9.
  • June 29th, 2009: Powerpoints and notes from the GEM RB Climatology Focus Group/NGSSC meeting have been posted at http://virbo.org/GEM_NGRSC_2009. Of special note is a talk by Davin Larson titled Using the THEMIS energetic Particle Data which gives details on their progress in developing data products for radiation belt science.
  • On Friday, August 30th, at 1400, Weigel will give a talk at IAGA on the future of the virtual observatories and example science use-cases.
  • On Monday, August 3rd, Weigel will give a presentation at the Earth and Space Science Informatics Workshop on modern methods for managing scientific metadata (based on the software discussed at http://vxoware.org and used at http://virbo.org/meta) and on server technology that enables real-time supersetting, subsetting, and browsing of high-cadence data sets.
  • April 27th, 2009: Preliminary agenda for joint GEM RB Climatology Focus Group/NGSSC meeting announced. See http://virbo.org/GEM_NGRSC_2009.

Radiation-Belt data

VxO interface

  • July 15th, 2009 - ViRBO provides SVN and git hosting service. We will be moving a few source code repositories over to https://virbo.repositoryhosting.com/account. Eventually the access URL will be http://svn.virbo.org and http://git.virbo.org. If you would like to create a project, please send an email to virbo@virbo.org.
  • March 1, 2009 - A new version of Autoplot was released that allows it to be run as an applet in a browser. After a month or two of bug testing, we will allow users to interact with data in the browser if they have Java 1.5+ enabled. The user will be given the option of turning a png image into an interactive applet. Examples are given in the directory http://aurora.gmu.edu/applet/.
  • January 24, 2009 - The entire SMWG metadata repository is now searchable through ViRBO's metadata interface. Work continues on testing this interface and improving the feature of allowing users to upload metadata or edit and create metadata using only a web browser. We are also discussing how the software for this interface, VxOware, can be used by other virtual observatories.

3 Data

Use the links below to access and view data. Use the Inventory links to determine the time intervals when data are available. Data with Inventory links are available as merged files (all data in a single file, see Notes#Merged_files for help with these files); subsetting will eventually be available through the ViRBO API (in alpha testing). Other data sets are available in their original file formats only. The metadata for these data sets are stored at ViRBO's metadata site, http://virbo.org/meta. See the Active Projects section for information about data products and services that we are working on.

AMIE-derived indices Inventory Geomagnetic indices derived from the AMIE model.
Augsburg ULF Index Inventory A ULF index derived from ground magnetometer measurements.
TSX5 CEASE Electron data from the CEASE instrument on TSX-5 from Aerospace.
ISGI Inventory Geomagnetic indices aa, am, AE, AL, AU, AO; quiet day index.
GEO Reanalysis Inventory O'Brien-Lemon GEO Reanalysis data set.
OMNI2 Inventory The one-hour-resolution OMNI data set covering 1963-present.
OMNIHR Inventory The one-minute-resolution OMNI data set covering 1995-present.
GOES (via NGDC) Inventory GOES 05-12 X-Ray, mag. field, and particle data from NGDC.
GOES-12 (via ONERA) GOES 12 Processed and corrected GOES 12 particle data from ONERA.
HEO Data from the HEO-1 and HEO-3 satellites.
LANL (via LANL) LANL 1991-080, LANL1989-046, LANLLANL-01A particle data from LANL.
OV OV1-19 and OV3-3 particle measurements from Aerospace.
PC Index Inventory Thule and Vostok polar cap index.
POES (via NGDC) Inventory POES 15-18 and MetOp particle and support data from NGDC.
POES (via CDAWeb) Inventory POES 05-14 particle and support data from CDAWeb.
SAMPEX (via SRL) SAMPEX Data from the SAMPEX Data Center
SAMPEX (via S. Kanekal) Daily-averaged and L-shell-binned SAMPEX MeV electron flux
SYM- and ASY-H indices Inventory 1-minute SYM and ASY-H indices from Kyoto
T05 inputs Inventory Inputs to the Tsyganenko 2001, 2004, and 2005 magnetic field model

ViRBO's ftp site is ftp://virbo.org.

4 Resources

Software Radiation belt-related software. See General Resources for other software.

  • IPSAT: Ionizing particle in space analysis tool - "It is now well known that all instruments devoted to ionizing charged particle measurements flying in space are never perfect. Response analysis for each instrument is very time consuming but must be always done before any use of those data. For such purpose a software has been developed at ONERA-DESP under CNES funding to analyze saturation, contamination and other problems in any instrument and to cross calibrate measurements between spacecraft in an easy way. The software allows to compose time series plots of various spacecraft/instruments to compare them in a quick way, to plot correlation between two data sets and check for the coherence among all data. Moreover, the IPSAT software allows to plot in situ measurement along various orbits for any time from 1990 to present. The available data range from public access to private access to ONERA or partners. The available orbits with measurements on-board are LEO, MEO, GEO and some GTO and HEO with more or less continuous time coverage. The current data base is now about 400 Go. This can be very helpful for spacecraft anomaly analysis especially in case the spacecraft has no radiation measurements on-board. The IPSAT software can be accessed on the web after being registered."
  • IRBEM (Formerly ONERA DESP) This software library contains MATLAB and IDL wrappers to various geomagnetic field models. With this library, one can compute the magnetic coordinates (i.e., L, L*) at any location in Earth's magnetosphere.
  • The AP-8/AE-8 (A=Aerospace, E=electron, P=proton and MIN and MAX versions correspond to solar min and max conditions, respectively) models ... . These models may be run at the CCMC. The AP-8 MIN/MAX model was described by Sawyer and Vette, 1976. Search for AP-8 AE-8 at NASA/ADS.
  • AP-9/AE-9 model is under development and a beta version is expected in CY 2009. It is intended to provide the same outputs of the AP-8/AE-8 model with the addition of error bars and uncertainties due to variability. For updates on the status of this model, watch the meeting links below. An update was given at the 2009 meeting and more information is available at lws-set.gsfc.nasa.gov. Eventually the code will be a part of the IRBEM package and AF-GEOSPACE.
  • SIZM A radiation belt proton, antiproton, and secondary model.
  • Tsyganenko Magnetic Field Models
  • SPENVIS Given a spacecraft trajectory or a coordinate grid, it calculates geomagnetic coordinates. trapped proton and electron fluxes, solar proton fluences, and many other parameters.
  • ModelWeb Run various ionospheric, geomagnetic, and magnetospheric models from a web interface.
  • "AF-GEOSPACE is a user-friendly, graphics-intensive software program bringing together many of the space environment models, applications, and data visualization products developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory and others in the space weather community."

Science

News

  • 05/18/2009 - An Observation Linking the Origin of Plasmaspheric Hiss to Discrete Chorus Emissions, Bortnik et al. Science
  • 03/23/2009 - NASA awards launch services contract for Radiation Belt Storm Probes mission, the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission and the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites K and L missions http://www.timesoftheinternet.com/56327.html
From time.com
From time.com
  • 2008 Fall AGU meeting posters and presentations: SAO/NASA ADS
  • Search Google News for latest mentions of "Radiation Belt" html
  • 1958 article in Time Magazine html
  • Search Google News for historical mentions of "Radiation Belt" html

Meetings

Recent Papers

About the Radiation Belt

History

  • What is a Space Scientist? by James Van Allen: archive.org
  • Hess, Wilmont N., The Radiation Belt and Magnetosphere, 1968. google books Contains a detailed history of the discovery of the radiation belts and an overview of the many research results in the preceding ten years.
  • Discovering Earth's Radiation Belts: Remembering Explorer 1 and 3 by F. McDonald and J. E. Naugle pdf

Books

  • Alfven and Falthammar, Cosmological Electrodynamics, 1963. amazon
  • Hess, Wilmont N., The Radiation Belt and Magnetosphere, 1968. Contains a detailed history of the discovery of the radiation belts and an overview of the many research results in the preceding ten years. google books
  • Schultz and Lanzerotti, Particle Diffusion in the Radiation Belts, 1974. google books
  • Walt, M., Introduction to Geomagnetically Trapped Radiation, Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 1994. google books

Presentations

download .ppt The Earth's Radiation Belt by Baker, D.N., S.R. Elkington, X. Li at the Fall 2006 AGU SPA Tutorial

Show ppt here

download .ppt Radiation Belt Redux: Science Objectives of the Radiation Belt Storm Probes Mission by H.E. Spence at the June 2007 GEM Student Tutorial
Show ppt here

5 General VO Resources

Software

  • http://virbo.org/Main_Page#Resources contains a list of radiation-belt-specific software tools.
  • http://www.jhelioviewer.org/ "JHelioviewer is a visualization tool for JPEG2000 images and movies. JHelioviewer makes it easy to explore the Sun! When you launch JHelioviewer, a sample image is loaded right away. Simply select a time range and instrument in the observation panel to access more images or to generate a movie. So far (June 08, 2009), all SOHO images from 2003 are available."
  • http://autoplot.org "Autoplot is an interactive browser for data on the web. Give it a URL or a name of a file on your computer and it tries to create a sensible plot. It was developed to allow quick and interactive browsing of data and metadata."
  • http://papco.org "PaPCo is IDL software for data visualization and analysis. It is modular, PaPCo modules built by various institutions and individuals plug into PaPCo core to provide data products. These modules provide graphic panels that are stacked on a time axis. About 60 modules exist, and 30 are supported as “core modules” that come with PaPCo. There are modules from 15+ spacecraft, including CRRES, Polar, Cassini and Cluster. Data from CDAWeb is plottable as well. The software is open-source, making it very flexible and well-suited for science use."
  • http://vxoware.org Developed as part of the NASA-supported ViRBO project. "VxOware is a content and data management system and is intended for use by a VxO or an entity that manages scientific data. In analogy to the VxO concept, in which data and services are united, VxOware unites software and tools for building an instance of a VxO in the Virtual Observatory network. VxOware has features such as system and user administration, interactive visualization tools, user-editable content, version tracking, and an integrated OPeNDAP server for data delivery."
  • http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/ramadda/index.html "RAMADDA (Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse DAta) is a new development effort of the Unidata Program Center with the goal to provide an open and extensible data repository framework."
  • http://ovt.irfu.se/ "Orbit Visualization Tool (OVT) is a software designed for interactive 3D visualization of satellite orbits in the terrestrial magnetosphere."
  • http://www.dchart.org/ "DChart is a Web application that allows you to visualize and download in-situ and gridded oceanographic and atmospheric data from files or OPeNDAP servers. Features include an interactive map, an in-situ station layer that allows you to select data stations, and a plot window that allows you to plot data from one or more stations. Several in-situ (profile, property-property, and time series) and gridded (raster and Google Earth animations) plot types are supported, and users can interact directly with the plot to pan or zoom to a desired location."
  • http://sidc.be/SWB/ "The Solar Weather Browser (SWB) is a software tool developed by the Royal Observatory of Belgium for easy visualisation of solar images in combination with any context information that can be overlaid on the images and that is space weather relevant.", for example "... a combination of an EIT/19.5 nm image with an overlay of CME detections by CACTus ..." and "... a combination of an EIT/17.1 nm image with a 14 degrees grid and NOAA active region numbers."
  • http://datashop.jhuapl.edu/ Services and Tools for Heliophysics Science Analysis
  • http://sd-www.jhuapl.edu/MIDL/ "Mission Independent Data Layer - web-based software for accessing and analyzing space phsyics data"
  • http://cosec.lmsal.com/About%20CoSEC.html "The primary research objective of this group is the development of models and technologies that enable effective coordination and cooperation of distributed scientists, sensors, and other resources to analyze the sun-earth causal connection."
  • http://www.sp.ph.ic.ac.uk/csc-web/QSAS/ "QSAS is a software package which provides a flexible, extendable environment for the selection, manipulation, and display of space physics data. QSAS is written in C/C++ and is compiled using the gnu compiler set, and makes use of several elements of third-party software, including Qt (http://trolltech.com/products), cdf (http://cdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/) and PLplot (http://plplot.sourceforge.net/)."
  • http://sscweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/skteditor/ "The SKTEditor is a simple graphical user interface (GUI) application for creating and editing International Solar-Terrestrial Physics (ISTP)/Interagency Consultative Group (IACG) guideline compliant skeleton Common Data Format (CDF) files. The application is supported as either a Java Web Start application or as a traditional Java desktop application on a wide range of platforms."
  • http://madrigal.haystack.mit.edu/madrigal/wt_whatIsMadrigal.html "Madrigal is a robust, World Wide Web based system capable of managing and serving archival and real-time data, in a variety of formats, from a wide range of ground-based instruments. Madrigal is installed at a number of sites around the world. Each site controls their own Madrigal installation, and can add or upgrade their data from their instrument(s) on their site at any time. In addition to storing data in the standard Madrigal/Cedar format, each site can also add additional web-based documentation such as plots or descriptive notes to individual experiments they run."
  • http://data.renci.org/ "The goal of this project is to improve curation, sharing, and integration of research data. The project is developing: Open source data management software (Sarcomere), A conceptual data abstraction for relational data ("Sarcomere schema"), A data management protocol (THUMP-DL), Data exchange with interoperable schema sharing and mapping, Lightweight services for integrating user code into the system, and High performance computing integration"
  • http://www.sciberquest.com/ "SciberQuest, Inc. specializes in providing advanced solutions to handle the most complex computational and data analysis facing the scientific world and industry. Some of our current projects include the development of (i) self-adaptive algorithms for modeling of complex, multi-scale problems, (ii) Peer to Peer collaboratory software, (iii) computational infrastructure for NASA's magnetospheric virtual observatory, and (iv) specialized codes for the Air Force including a first-ever, multi-resolution, 3D, parallel, object-oriented, electromagnetic PIC code capable of handling complex boundaries."

Services

About

Forums

  • http://groups.google.com/group/vxo-spase-smwg "This group is for the discussion of SPASE metadata records. A group that manages high-level SPASE metadata (Person, Registry, Instrument, and Observatory) is called the SPASE Metadata Working Group (SMWG). Metadata records that have cross-VxO interest will be maintained by this group, rather than by a individual VxO. A secondary goal of this group is to normalize the usage of the SPASE metadata model."
  • http://groups.google.com/group/vxo-developer "For announcement and discussion about VxO software tools."
  • http://groups.google.com/group/virbo
  • spase at listserv.gsfc.nasa.gov Discussion of the SPASE metadata model. No archive online.

Data

  • List of data repositories in VMO git metadata repository
  • http://ulcar.uml.edu/GIRO/ Global Ionospheric Radio Observatory
  • http://ampere.jhuapl.edu AMPERE Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/2008/080721.asp
  • http://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov: "The SPDF is a project of the Heliospheric Science Division (HSD) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. SPDF consists of web-based services for survey and high resolution data and trajectories. The Facility support data from most NASA Heliophysics missions to promote correlative and collaborative research across discipline and mission boundaries."
  • http://vspo.gsfc.nasa.gov/ "The basic philosophy, shared with the Virtual Solar Observatory and many other such projects, is to register data products from disparate repositories using a common language that allows searching across datasets, retrieving data, and performing analysis and visualization in a uniform way."
  • http://ftpbrowser.gsfc.nasa.gov FTPBrowse
  • http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ "NASA's permanent archive for space science mission data."
  • http://space.augsburg.edu/space Ground Magnetometer Data and Data Products at Augsburg College
  • http://www.srl.caltech.edu/sampex/DataCenter SAMPEX Data Center
  • http://cluster2.space.swri.edu SWRI Cluster PEACE high-resolution data system - "This web site provides plots of data from the ESA-NASA Cluster mission to support data browsing and event selection. The Cluster-PEACE Team have provided high time resolution PEACE data from all four Cluster spacecraft for that purpose. With approval from the PEACE PI, PEACE data may also be downloaded from here. Furthermore, the web site and underlying system design is compatible with the addition of data from other Cluster instruments."
  • http://spc.igpp.ucla.edu/mcmac/ and http://spc.igpp.ucla.edu/mcmac/data McMAC "Mid-continent Magnetoseismic Chain (McMAC) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) project that conducts research in magnetospheric sounding using ground magnetic field observations. We refer the methodology used in this research as "magneto-seismology", reflecting its similarity to terrestrial seismology and helioseismology."
  • http://portal.cssdp.ca:8080/ssdp/jsp/logon.jsp CSSDP "The CSSDP is a secure data distribution portal for the Canadian GeoSpace Monitoring program (CGSM), involving six university and government partners that are each responsible for management, archival and validation of their own data. The CSSDP presents users with a seamless, single point of access to CGSM data, visualization tools, and value-added data products."
  • http://isdc.gfz-potsdam.de/index.php ISDC "ISDC's online service portal is an access point for all manner of geoscientific geodata, its corresponding metadata, scientific documentation and software tools"
  • http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/home/index.html "The British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) is the Natural Environment Research Council's (NERC) Designated Data Centre for the Atmospheric Sciences. The role of the BADC is to assist UK atmospheric researchers to locate, access and interpret atmospheric data and to ensure the long-term integrity of atmospheric data produced by NERC projects."
  • http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/Data/ Space Weather Prediction Center's real-time data and forecasts
  • http://spidr.ngdc.noaa.gov/spidr/ "The Space Physics Interactive Data Resource (SPIDR) is designed to allow a solar terrestrial physics customer to intelligently access and manage historical space physics data for integration with environment models and space weather forecasts. SPIDR is a distributed network of synchronous databases and 100% Java middle-ware servers accessed via the World Wide Web."

VxO

  • http://hpde.gsfc.nasa.gov/hpde_data_access.html HPDE list of Observatories
  • HELIO | ppt | ppt | ppt "The Heliophysics Integrated Observatory, HELIO, will deploy a distributed network of services that will address the needs of a broad community of researchers in heliophysics. HELIO will provide the most comprehensive integrated information system in this domain; it will coordinate access to the resources needed by the community, and will provide access to services to mine and analyze the data."
  • http://us-vo.org US National Virtual Observatory
  • http://www.ipy.org IPY International Polar Year " The International Polar Year is a large scientific programme focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic from March 2007 to March 2009. IPY, organized through the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), is actually the fourth polar year, following those in 1882-3, 1932-3, and 1957-8. In order to have full and equal coverage of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, IPY 2007-8 covers two full annual cycles from March 2007 to March 2009 and will involve over 200 projects, with thousands of scientists from over 60 nations examining a wide range of physical, biological and social research topics. It is also an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate, follow, and get involved with, cutting edge science in real-time."
  • http://www.ipy.org/index.php?ipy/detail/icestar_ihy ICESTAR "ICESTAR & International Heliophysical Year (IHY) - Interhemispheric Conjugacy in Geospace Phenomena and their Heliospheric Drivers High energy particles from space generate the Aurora and illustrate why the polar regions are unique places for space research. Throughout IPY scientists from 22 countries, using instruments on balloons, ships, spacecraft and the ground will investigate how plasma and magnetic fields from the Sun affect near-Earth space and our atmosphere, improving our understanding of the impact of space weather on satellites, ground-based technology, terrestrial weather and climate."
  • http://vspo.gsfc.nasa.gov/websearch/dispatcher Virtual Space Physics Observatory (VSPO)
  • http://vmo.nasa.gov VMO/G Virtual Magnetospheric Observatory (at Goddard Space Flight Center)
  • http://vitmo.jhuapl.edu/ VITMO - A Data Discovery System for Ionosphere Thermosphere Mesosphere Data "... allows the user to find previously unknown data sets as well as old familiar ones through a single, easy to use interface. Click on the button below to initiate a query of space physics data sets which integrate data, services and tools across many missions, data centers, agencies and countries and suggests related models to use with your data." ... "and provides data covering the Ionosphere Thermosphere Mesosphere (ITM). The ITM region is observed by ground based remote sensing instruments, satellite based remote sensing instruments, and in-situ satellite instruments. In addition, there are external drivers in solar radiation and the solar wind and magnetospheric particle inputs. A Virtual Observatory that covers the ITM region needs to deal with the large diversity of data types in the study of this region."
  • http://virtualsolar.org/ Virtual Solar Observatory
  • http://vsto.hao.ucar.edu/ "The Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO) - a collaborative project between the High Altitude Observatory and Scientific Computing Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and McGuinness Associates. VSTO is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) in the Shared Cyberinfrastructure (SCI) division."
  • http://vseo.space.swri.edu VSEO "The Virtual Sun/Earth Observatory offers a quick and easy method for visualizing and downloading SwRI's legacy data sets, primarily focused on the Sun and Earth."
  • http://www.ukssdc.ac.uk/sedat/ SEDAT "The Space Environment Database and Analysis Tools (SEDAT) project is intended to develop a new approach to the engineering analysis of spacecraft charged-particle environments, part of what is also known as "space weather". Energetic charged particles and plasma environments can cause a number of problems for spacecraft. ... This project will assemble a database containing a large and comprehensive set of data about that environment as measured in-situ by a number of space missions. Thus the user will be able to select a set of space environment data appropriate to the engineering problem under study. "
  • http://gaia-vxo.org/index.html "GAIA is a virtual observatory providing quick access to summary data from satellite and ground-based instruments that remote sense auroral precipitation. Data from riometers, All-Sky Imagers (ASIs), Meridian Scanning Photometers (MSPs), and satellite-based global imagers are included in GAIA. GAIA is the virtual observatory for Gloria and the Auroral Optical Network, both of which are elements of the IPY IHY/ICESTAR intiative."
  • http://www.spaceweather.eu spaceweather.eu "Welcome to the European Space Weatheri Portal, a centralized access to European Space Weather resources."
  • x http://mist.engin.umich.edu/mist/vgmo/vgmo.html VGMO.NET and pdf
  • http://www.egso.org/ European Grid of Solar Observations (EGSO) "EGSO, the "European Grid of Solar Observations", is a Grid test-bed funded under the EC's Fifth Framework Programme. It addresses the problem of combining heterogeneous data from scattered archives of space and ground-based observations into a single "virtual" dataset. EGSO has also created catalogues of solar features and observation data to enable innovative searching, and provide visualisation tools for user-friendly data browsing."
  • http://supermag.jhuapl.edu/index.html "SuperMAG utilizes 3D vector measurements of the magnetic field obtained from ground bases magnetometers. Stations providing absolute measurements (e.g. Intermagnet Observatories) as well as stations providing relative measurements are included. SuperMAG is focused on the variations caused by electric currents flowing in the ionosphere and magnetosphere and hence subtracts the dominant and slowly varying Earth main field. SuperMAG does not enable the user to study the absolute magnetic field and hence could be referred to as a variometer initiative."
  • http://vepo.gsfc.nasa.gov/Introduction.html "The Virtual Energetic Particle Observatory (VEPO) serves the heliophysics data user community as a focus group component operating within the domain of the Virtual Heliospheric Observatory (VHO) for improved discovery, access, understandability, and usability of energetic particle data products from selected spacecraft and sub-orbital instruments within the VEPO Data Source Environment."
  • http://vwo.gsfc.nasa.gov/ "The goal of the VWO is to make Heliophysics plasma wave and radiation data searchable, understandable and usable by the Heliophysics community."
  • http://cdpp-amda.cesr.fr/DDHTML/index.html - A space physics on-line analysis tool developed by CDPP - "One of the main goals of AMDA is to ease the management of time tables or event lists: with AMDA you create time tables by visual inspection or by editing a mathematical condition on data content; you can also upload/download time tables in simple ascii or more standardized xml VOTable format. The new feature of AMDA enables now to share your own time tables with the AMDA user community. These ‘shared’ time tables are directly accessible in the system to all users but also via a public page"

6 Active Projects

These are some of the projects we are working on (or planning to work on).

Metadata

  • Verification and review of all metadata.

Services

Near-term:

  • Develop a service and data set that provides L and L* for common satellites.
  • Implement a service that performs orbit calculations on AE-8 and AP-8 models. Implement a service that does the same for AE-9 and AP-9 models
  • Add L-sort plots to browse products

Long-term:

  • Develop a service that simplifies data assimilation for radiation belt models.
  • Develop a service that "flies" a real or notional spacecraft through a 4-D environment (e.g., the output of a data assimilation or simulation). In this use case, it's often necessary to time shift the orbit or the simulation to ensure they overlap, which requires additional calculation.
  • A principal component (PC) calculator and plotter. Given a 4-D data cube, compute and plot the 3-D PCs, and also plot the time series of PC amplitudes. Similar to computing the boundary normal or minimum variance coordinates. The algorithms are simple, although they do invoke eigenvalue/eigenvector factorization (which is widely available). The results would be stored as a new data product.

Data

Near-term:

  • HEO 1 and 3 - Make available as browse product and put in CDF
  • OV1-19 and OV3-3 - Make available as browse product and put in CDF
  • S33 - Make available as browse product and put in CDF
  • SCATHA – Make available as browse product and put in CDF
  • CRRESS – Make available as browse product and put in CDF
  • GOES < 12 Develop or obtain PRBEM-formatted data
  • SYM-H and ASYM-H geomagnetic indices – complete metadata
  • LANL_1989_046 – Make available as interactive browse product
  • LANL_1991_080 - Make available as interactive browse product
  • LANL_LANL_01A - Make available as interactive browse product
  • Polar - Make available as interactive browse product
  • SAMPEX - Make available as interactive browse product and in CDF

Other data we are looking into:

  • TWINS ES – Metadata work
  • SAMPEX post-mission
  • Full resolution NOAA-14- data – Conversion to CDF and metadata work
  • THEMIS-SSD – Metadata and implementation and make available as a browse product
  • AFRL DSX – Metadata and make available as a browse product
  • International Space Station dosimeter data
  • DEMETER
  • Orsted
  • CHAMP
  • ROSAT
  • TOPEX
  • Any data not on the above list but listed here: http://www.ukssdc.ac.uk/sedat/datasets.html

Tools

Metadata services

  • Documentation of the metadata API [3]
  • Combining metadata management tools (VxOware, SPASE editor, SPASE-QL tools, etc.)

Data Services

We are developing a high performance data server that allows fast filtering and subsetting - see http://timeseries.org. At present our subsetting option is very limited and we just give access to all data associated with a data set in a single merged file.

  • Text output: ASCII output of data (near term)
  • Other output: A data query will result in a MATLAB or IDL script that interfaces with our server. Just cut-and-paste the script into your session, and the script pulls the data into your IDL or MATLAB workspace.
  • Constraint expressions: We are developing a service that allows the user to subset data on the server. For example, if you wanted to return ASCII data for a spacecraft's location only when when B/Bo was less than 0.1, you would enter a URL like 
    http://virbo.org/data/DATASETNAME/?constraint=B/Bo<0.1&return=X,Y,Z&output=ascii
  • Documentation of the data API

Visualization

7 FAQ

What is a Virtual Observatory? From http://hpde.gsfc.nasa.gov/VO_Framework_7_Jan_05.html

“A VO is a service that unites services and/or multiple data providers, with a "VxO" doing this for community "x."”

“… a suite of software applications on a set of computers that allows users to uniformly find, access, and use resources (data, software, document, and image products and services using these) from a collection of distributed product and service providers. A VO includes registries based on a metadata model, front-end applications, and connections to data providers.”

In addition, we think that a virtual observatory should work with their community to

  • Identify and allow community access to new instrument data, model code and output, movies, tools, etc. available. More and more individuals are creating specialized data sets or tools (i.e., event lists, filtered data, etc.). They need to work with their VO to identify ways in which their data can be made available to the greater data environment (besides just posting a text file or tarball on their web page).
  • Improve metadata and make metadata generation for new data products easier.

Why does ViRBO host files? The “small box” Virtual Observatory concept says that a virtual observatory should only provide services for data in remote locations. Ultimately, however, our objective is to make doing radiation belt science easier.

For small data sets, it is more efficient and reliable to serve data from ViRBO’s server, especially when we want to do transforms or filtering of the data or combine data from multiple locations. Ideally there would be a service that provided our required speed and reliability and ViRBO would connect to this service. In fact, we are developing such a service (see http://timeseries.org). Eventually this service will be separated from ViRBO.

Another reason we host files is as a service to the community. Many of the data sets are from government labs. It is much easier for them to expose their data from ViRBO than to set up a ftp site of their own. Eventually these data sets will be migrated to a data center that specializes in long-term hosting and maintenance of data.

What is the “small box” concept?

Figure 1 The “small box” Virtual Observatory concept says that a virtual observatory should only provide services for data in remote locations.
Figure 1 The “small box” Virtual Observatory concept says that a virtual observatory should only provide services for data in remote locations.

The “small box” Virtual Observatory concept says that a virtual observatory should only provide services for data in remote locations, as shown in Figure 1 from [4].

In the first three years of operations, many virtual observatories have been involved in activities that fall outside of the “small box”. This usually happens when a service they needed for their community did not exist, so they had to create it themselves.

What is ViRBO’s long-term plan? Most of the NASA Virtual Observatories were funded under 3-year proposals, and this period is ending in 2009. The Virtual Observatories are a component of the Heliophysics Data Environment (HPDE), which is undergoing Senior Review in Summer 2009. The proposed plan for the Virtual Observatories is to continue operations and services normally. Over the next year, ViRBO will be (1) spinning off a number of its non—VO activities into separate projects that provide cross-cutting services to VOs, and (2) focusing more on VO—type projects.

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