The University of Colorado's Space Weather Technology Research and Education Center Space Weather Portal—A Tool for Lowering the Barrier to Data Access

In our work with researchers and educators, we consistently hear that a significant barrier they encounter is obtaining datasets from disparate providers in varying formats and that having an idea of what is available (e.g. is there an instrument outage during the time of interest?) before downloading it is challenging. Further, obtaining similar datasets for different timeframes is equally difficult. This is particularly challenging for space weather researchers attempting to characterize an event from the moment of occurrence on the Sun to the impacts it has on the Earth since so many disparate datasets are available for so many different timeframes.

As part of the University of Colorado’s Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center (SWx-TREC https://www.colorado.edu/spaceweather/), the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) is developing a Space Weather Portal (http://lasp.colorado.edu/space-weather-portal) to provide unified access to disparate datasets to help close the Research to Operations (R2O) and Operations to Research (O2R) gap. This presentation will describe how this portal can be used to characterize an historical event (2015 St. Patrick’s day storm) from available datasets, visualize them and download them for further use. It will also describe the underlying middleware (LaTiS) that enables the portal.

Figure: Screenshot of the Space Weather Portal with a few datasets visualized