Commercial Data Streams Can Help Mitigate National Space Weather Hazards

Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology passed the “Space Weather Coordination Act.” While not yet U.S. law, it points to the direction that Congress has interest in seeing U.S. space weather organizations evolve. It especially calls for a pilot program to obtain commercial sector space weather data and assess its feasibility in mitigating national space weather hazards. Commercial organizations have made significant progress in recent years developing data products and services. We report on the strengths and weaknesses of several mature and new commercial data streams that Space Environment Technologies (SET) and its partners have developed. These are considered a collaborative part of a national space weather enterprise data creation strategy. Included in this discussion are: i)solar and geomagnetic forecast indices provided to the U.S. Air Force for managing Low Earth Orbit space; ii)a seminal database of HASDM reference atmosphere densities over nearly two solar cycles;iii)a new database of global aviation radiation observations for a half solar cycle; iv)a developing data stream of GPS single frequency TEC correction maps improving position accuracy; and v)innovative plans for making new, operationally useful measurements of lower thermosphere neutral density/temperature and F1 region ionosphere ion densities for regional forecasts. All these examples show that commercial space weather data is an asset for U.S. government agencies to mitigate space weather hazards. The commercial space weather industry, along with major research universities and government agencies, has also undertaken efforts to develop standards and guidelines for ground-, ocean-, air-, and space-based space weather data and metadata. These efforts include developing space environment standards through the International Standards Organization and guidelines for the exchange of metadata in space weather data files. There are even corporate standards for quality assurance now related to space weather data and all these will be outlined in a discussion of how standards might evolve.