This is a 3-year effort to continue and expand the operation and utility of the SuperMAG facility. SuperMAG is a data collection, processing, and distribution service for ground-based magnetic field perturbation measurements. It was established by the PI and his team under an existing 3-year NSF grant, AGS-0646323, which expires at the end of April 2010. Through a worldwide collaboration of organizations and national agencies the facility currently includes data from more than 250 ground-based magnetometers and covers the time span from 1997 through 2001. Via a user friendly website it provides measurements of magnetic field perturbations from all available stations in the same coordinate system, with identical time resolution and a common baseline removal approach. The service has been publicly available since January 2009. The worldwide distribution of ground-based magnetic field variation measurements has been a backbone of magnetospheric and ionospheric research since the very beginning of the field. It continues to be a valuable resource for a wide range of science investigations, providing one of the few available means of assessing the global dynamics of the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere system and addressing questions of cross-scale coupling. The goal of this project is to further develop the SuperMAG service for the benefits of the science community as well as students, teachers and the general public. Specifically, the facility will be enhanced in the following ways: 1) Expand the data-holdings to include the years 2002-2010 and 1996; 2) Expand the spatial coverage by including data from a list of new SuperMAG collaborators; 3) Develop additional user-friendly tools for analysis and education and public outreach (EPO). The proposed effort will build on the existing comprehensive infrastructure to include an additional 10 years of 1-min data from ~250 stations for a total of ~2500 years of validated, rotated and base-lined magnetometer data.
This project being for the operation and further development of a public science data service facility, by design, has strong broader impacts. Having only been operational for a short time (less than a year on line) it has already attracted a good number of users (more than 100 individual registered users) and shows a steadily increasing trend in usage. The planned enhancements in data holdings and flexible user specified data products are certain to increase usage even further. The facility undertakes several initiatives specifically aimed at involving students and teachers at all levels both as users and developers of the service. The Collaboration with a large and diverse international group of data providers is at the heart of the facility. This collaboration will be further expanded and strengthened through this next installment of the project.
SuperMAG is a worldwide collaboration of organizations and national agencies that currently operate more than 300 ground-based magnetometers. Through a user friendly website it provides measurements of magnetic field perturbations from all available stations in the same coordinate system, with identical time resolution and a common baseline removal approach. This high quality dataset enables continuous and nearly global monitoring of the ionospheric current system and its coupling to the magnetosphere. Before SuperMAG, global or even local studies required painstaking and labor-intensive data handling, which effectively limited or even prevented research projects. Analysts faced several inherent complications: confusing or even unknown coordinate systems, a multitude of data artifacts and errors, unknown baselines, and even difficulties obtaining data. These problems have resulted in a serious underutilization of data from magnetometers. With the introduction of SuperMAG the researcher is offered a unique opportunity to easily obtain data and publication quality plots that allow them to address the global spatiotemporal behavior of the global ionospheric electric current system and its coupling to the magnetosphere. This proposal proved that SuperMAG is the most cost effective means to enhance the utilization of the extensive ground based magnetometer data set for the benefit of the science community as well as students, teachers and the general public. SuperMAG has a proven record of excellence as a community service as well as a tool for student activities. In fact SuperMAG already has more than 500 registered users with a constant increase in all measures of usage. Easy access to measurements from ~300 ground based magnetometers covering more than one solar cycle provides an observational foundation will allow much more solid conclusions than those derived from previous single event studies enabeling new and exciting science.
