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SWx TREC’s Space Weather Data Portal: a launch pad for space weather research
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  • Jenny Knuth,
  • Greg Lucas,
  • CHRISTOPHER PANKRATZ,
  • Thomas Berger,
  • Richard Clark,
  • Tamitha Skov
Jenny Knuth
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Greg Lucas
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics
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CHRISTOPHER PANKRATZ
University of Colorado Boulder
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Thomas Berger
CU Boulder
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Richard Clark
Millersville University
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Tamitha Skov
Millersville University
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Abstract

One obstacle to space weather research is the practical challenge of accessing relevant data. Space weather data are housed in disparate repositories, each with its own unique focus, be it solar, magnetospheric, atmospheric, or earth-based. Much of the effort spent acquiring data could instead be spent on space weather research and education. To address this problem, the Space Weather Technology, Research, and Education Center (SWx TREC), at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in collaboration with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), has developed the Space Weather Data Portal (https://lasp.colorado.edu/space-weather-portal), a tool built by and for the space weather community. Through the Data Portal, previously dispersed space weather data are in one unified place, accessible to scientists, students, and curious individuals. The focus is on the users and their ability to discover, display, compare, overplot, and download relevant data. A user can filter for past events then easily display and download data related to that event, from the moment it occurs on the Sun, as it travels through space and the atmosphere, to the impacts it has on the Earth. Analysis of space weather events via the Data Portal has proved useful for forecaster training and online learning. The community-created Event Library is a short-cut to curated data collections that provide narratives for context and serve as launch pads for further space weather exploration. This presentation will highlight contributions to the Data Portal from the community: datasets, event markers, timelines, and narrated data collections. Your contributions are encouraged as new resources and improvements are deployed every few weeks. Through this iterative, collaborative process, the Data Portal aims to increase awareness of space weather and its impacts and decrease the time between research and real-world applications.