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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 to virbo@virbo.org or look for us at GEM 2009.

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 Augsburg/ULF 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. 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 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

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

  • 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 and 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.

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 post mission data Information about provisional post-mission (2004+) data from SAMPEX
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

  • 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

  • Very low-frequency radio waves drain Earth's inner radiation belt of satellite-killing electrons, Physics Today [1]
  • A novel method for calculating L* using a neural network technique. The proposed method could speed up the time consuming calculations potentially by 5-6 orders of magnitude! The paper is currently in the first discussion stage of the Journal for Geoscientific Model Development. For the next 8 weeks the paper including the source code will be accessible for interactive public discussion via the webpage: http://www.geosci-model-dev-discuss.net/2/159/2009/gmdd-2-159-2009.html During this period (Open Discussion Phase), referees, authors and other members of the scientific community can submit interactive comments for immediate non-peer-reviewed e discussion paper. These comments are fully citable and archived together with the discussion paper.

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

5 General VO Resources

Software

  • 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://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

Services

About

Data

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

Tools

Metadata services

  • Documentation of the metadata API [2]
  • 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.

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 [3].

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.

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.

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 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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