The University of Colorado Space Weather Technology, Research, and Education Center's Space Weather Portal: A Tool for Easing Access to and Understanding of Datasets to Characterize Space Weather Events

In our work with researchers, we consistently hear that a significant hurdle they encounter is obtaining datasets from disparate providers in varying formats, needing to repeat processes to obtain new timeframes for those datasets and that having an idea of what is available (e.g. is there an instrument outage during the time of interest?) before downloading it is often unavailable. This is particularly challenging for space weather researchers attempting to characterize an event from the moment of occurrence on the Sun to the impacts it has on the Earth.

As part of the University of Colorado's Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center (SWx-TREC https://www.colorado.edu/spaceweather/), the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) is developing a Space Weather Portal (http://lasp.colorado.edu/space-weather-portal) to provide unified access to disparate datasets to help close the Research to Operations (R2O) and Operations to Research (O2R) gap. This presentation will describe how this portal can be used to characterize an historical event (2015 St. Patrick's day storm) from available datasets, visualize them and download them for further use. It will also describe the underlying middleware (LaTiS) that enables the portal.