NCEI Sun to Earth: Space Environment Archive, Tools and Uses

The NOAA Solar Terrestrial Physics Program within the US National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is dedicated to the observation and characterization of the natural environment from Sun to Earth. NCEI’s... [ view full abstract ]

The NOAA Solar Terrestrial Physics Program within the US National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is dedicated to the observation and characterization of the natural environment from Sun to Earth. NCEI’s environmental data sets from ground to orbital platforms are vast in both space and time, with worldwide contributions of solar imagery, geomagnetic and ionospheric measurements and interpretations dating long before the 1957/1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY). With technological advancements, continuous operational measurements of the near-Earth space environment have trended towards the use of fully instrumented space-based assets. Historically, space platform measurements in NOAA’s archive have provided (non-inclusively) irradiance measurements of the solar disk and plasma and magnetic properties of the equatorial radiation belt charged particle environment sensed by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), similar plasma properties and upper atmosphere energy inputs sensed by the low earth Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites (POES), the European Meteorological Operational (MetOp), and Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP; multi-institution collaboration) satellites. NOAA’s strong observational commitment continues with two flagship programs: the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) which provides NOAA with a new operational solar wind monitoring capability, and the new GOES-R program (GOES-16 launched November 2016) which will advance our solar and GEO radiation environment monitoring. Furthermore, NCEI’s commitment to safeguarding a comprehensive archive of geospace observations has been recently expanded to include newly released energetic charged particle measurements from GPS satellites in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) provided by the Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) in support of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) National Space Weather Action Plan (SWAP). Future analysis of these new publicly accessible measurements will dramatically increase our overall knowledge of the geospace radiation environment, critically important for astronaut safety and space asset launch, orbit raising and long term operations. The aggregated expertise within NCEI provides a powerful resource supporting many key, internationally valuable activities. These include leadership roles in cal/val and product development for GOES-R and Swarm, the development of the standard International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF), the World Magnetic Model and its Extension (WMM and EMM), several ionosphere focused products (e.g. the Swarm-based Dedicated Ionospheric Field Inversion (DIFI) model, and automatic scalings of real-time ionograms), satellite anomaly investigations, NOAA’s foray into the Big Data arena, and numerous contributions to the operations and research communities. We will present on a comprehensive summary of our current products, and future plans. We will conclude with a review of our experiences contributing to space asset anomaly investigations (www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/).