89th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting

Tuesday, 13 January 2009: 1:45 PM
Continual Solar Observations for Space Weather from GONG, a Ground-Based Network
Room 126B (Phoenix Convention Center)
Frank Hill, National Solar Observatory, Tucson, AZ ; and R. Komm, G. Petrie, J. W. Harvey, and I. Gonzalez Hernandez
The Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) is a ground-based network of six observing stations located in California, Hawaii, Australia, India, Spain and Chile. Headquartered in Tucson, AZ, GONG continually observes the sun with a 90% duty cycle around the clock. GONG was constructed to obtain observations of the sound waves trappped inside the sun in order to estimate the internal solar dynamics and structure, a field known as helioseismology. GONG's mission has recently been expanded to also produce several data products that are useful for space weather predictions. These products are one-minute cadence full-disk magnetograms; ten-miniute averages of these magnetograms; one-hour cadence synoptic magnetic field maps and potential field source-surface extrapolations; and twelve-hour far-side maps that show the presence of large active regions. In mid 2010, GONG will begin to supply one-minute cadence full-disk hydrogen alpha intensity data for flare patrol purposes. Most of these these products are available over the Internet in near-real time. In addition, we are developing flare predictors based on subsurface measurements obtained from helioseismology.

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