GAIA - A Virtual Auroral Observatory

Details GAIA - A Virtual Auroral Observatory GAIA - A Virtual Auroral Observatory

Dec 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005agufmsm33d..04d&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2005, abstract #SM33D-04

Physics

2407 Auroral Ionosphere (2704), 2748 Magnetotail Boundary Layers, 2794 Instruments And Techniques, 6929 Ionospheric Physics (1240, 2400), 7900 Space Weather

Scientific paper

Advancements in computer, communications, and instrument technologies have spawned an explosion of activity in ground-based geospace observations. There is increasing interest in the development of virtual observatories as we approach the International Polar and Heliosphysical Years and the electronic Geophysical Year, and are faced with burgeoning data sets from arrays of different instrument types the world over. We are developing a virtual observatory for dealing with data from geospace optical and riometer systems. While these two classes of instruments are very different in their observational technique, they are close relatives in what they observe, which is primarily auroral precipitation. The GAIA (Global Auroral Imaging Access) Project is a network-based set of tools for browsing summary data from All-Sky Imagers (ASIs), Meridian Scanning Photometers (MSPs), and riometers worldwide, and that provides indexes for direct access to data at PI institutes. This program is the virtual observatory component of the IPY Auroral Optical Network (AON) and GLORIA (Global Riometer Imaging Array) projects, and falls under the ICESTAR IPY grouping. As well, GAIA is being developed so as to be fully consistent with the data policies described in the `Declaration of the eGY'. We demonstrate the GAIA concept with ASI data from Canada and Finland, MSP data from Canada, and riometer data from Canada and Scandinavia. We explore the requirements that such a system must meet in order to be successful, which include ease of use, credit to data providers, ability for data providers to monitor usage, and reliance on software rather than hardware. The latter is consistent with our concept of a summary data set consisting of keograms, time series, and thumbnail images, a fully peer to peer data access system, and a relational data base that allows for easy grouping of and linkages between data. We describe how we are ensuring that GAIA is compatible with larger efforts such as SPIDR and MADRIGAL so that the tools we develop can be included in those systems if desired. We finish with two points. First, GAIA will facilitate new and exciting science. Second, `horizontal observatories' such as GAIA are the natural building blocks for a `Super Virtual observatory' that would bring together data from global networks of many different instrument types to address new and interesting science questions.

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