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.