SWx TREC's Space Weather Data Portal: A Flexible Data Access Tool for Nowcasting and Retrospective Analysis

The Space Weather Technology, Research, and Education Center (SWx TREC), at CU Boulder, provides a Space Weather Data Portal with a growing catalog of space weather datasets from a variety of institutions. The Portal brings together data from diverse repositories (e.g., NOAA, NASA, and the USGS), and aligns and displays the data from these disparate locations, by time period, within a single application.

Because of the flexibility of the Portal and its underlying catalog, it is easy to create collections of data to compare space weather events through time as well as to view current space weather conditions in real time. This presentation will show how the tool can be used to aid both forecasting and retrospective analyses.

More than a quicklook dashboard, the Portal provides interactive data analysis tools along with the ability to create custom arrangements and views that can be intuitively saved and shared. We will show how these features can be applied to examine both real-time data for up-to-the-minute nowcasting of current conditions and historic data for retrospective analysis and plotting of past events.

The ability to quickly analyze diverse space weather data within a single application is essential to advancing both space weather science and space weather forecasting. The Space Weather Data Portal at https://lasp.colorado.edu/space-weather-portal is an example of a nimble tool that makes it quick and easy to discover, display, and download relevant space weather data, whether retrospectively or in real time, either programmatically or through a web application, all in one place.