The Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO)

1. The Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO) Huairou Solar Observating Station National Astronomical Observatories Chinese Academy of Sciences Ganghua Lin

2. Outline • What is VSO • Why is VSO • Related Projects • VSO’s initial Components • Querying methods----before,now • Meaning for Us to Join VSO • Our basis • Arckitecture of CVSO • Related Web sites

3. What is VSO? • The VSO is a new tool for investigating the physics of the Sun and its impact on the Earth environment. It would provide users with a common interface to an integrated system of distributed data archives (both space- and ground-based) and analysis systems, thereby enabling data exploration and accelerating the scientific process. • The VSO will address one of the central challenges Of solar research: the need to locate, correlate, absorb, and analyze data from a wide array Of scientific instruments that measure the Sun on spatial and temporal scales that range over seven orders of magnitude.

4. What is VSO? • This observatory is “virtual” because it exists only in the form of masses of information stored in computer systems.

5. Why Is VSO The Sun exhibits complex phenomena, such as flares, that pose important challenges to our understanding of the universe, Solar structure varies on time scales from microseconds to decades and on horizontal and vertical spatial scales ranging from 10 to 106 km.

6. Why VSO • Understanding solar structure, and ultimately predicting solar behavior, requires the correlation of many types of observations. These observations, which cover the entire electro magnetic spectrum as well as energetic particles, cannot be obtained with any single instrument or indeed at any single observatory. Thus, the data are stored in a myriad of locations, in dozens of formats, and analyzed by numerous applications.

7. Why VSO A researcher who wishes to combine several data sets faces the tasks of finding the data somewhere in the world, searching each set for the observations that most nearly fulfill the precise scientific requirements, arranging to have the data delivered, and mastering the various storage formats and calibrations. These labor-Intensive steps must be completed before any analysis can even begin, and have deterred many researchers from performing studies that would provide valuable new insights into solar structure and the mechanisms of solar activity and variability.

8. Why is VSO • In spite of the difficulty of using such data systems, solar physics and the others have long exploited the scientific richness of cross-correlative studies. • This process of locate, correlate, absorb, and analyze data is extraordinarily time-consuming and labor-intensive; yet it is pursued. • The VSO will greatly increase the power and pace of the correlative studies needed to address fundamental challenges such as predicting geomagnetic storms, understanding solar irradiance variations and their effect on the Earth environment, detecting active regions below the solar surface before they cause solar activity, and understanding the generation of the solar wind,etc.

9. Related projects • EGSO (European Grid of Solar Observations). It is taking a more highly structured approach, with formal Work Packages and a more ambitious set of design goals. • SEC (the Solar Event Catalogue) server, which hosts event catalogues (flares, CME, etc.) and indices gathered from a number of sources and updated daily. • SFC (Solar Feature Catalogue) for sunspots, active regions and filaments. • DSO (Database of Solar Observatories) contains detailed information about all instruments and observatories

11. Related projects • Scientific Use Cases: such as, Flare impulsive phase: energy deposition, determine the conditions that lead to the onset of a flare, solar wind acceleration in the corona, comparison of coronal and in-situ solar wind diagnostics, phenomena associated with CME onset, etc

12. Related projects • NASA Living With a Star (LWS): There is a broader effort under way to provide a data environment for NASA’s Living With a Star program. Ideally, the VSO should “plug and play” with such a system. • CoSec (the Collaborative Sun-Earth Connector), • VSPO (Virtual Space Plasma Observatory), • VHO (Virtual Heliospheric Observatory)

13. VSO’s initial Components • The VSO is a scalable environment for searching, integrating, and analyzing databases distributed over the Internet. Initially, It would comprise a federated system of solar archives containing data from space- and ground-based instruments, from US and international sources, from NSF- and NASA-funded groups. A key element of the VSO is an integrated data-mining and analysis capability that can be applied both across and within databases.

14. VSO’s initial Components • NSO(National Solar Observatory): spectral atlases, magnetograms (photospheric and chromospheric), Dopplergrams, synoptic maps (magnetic field and other parameters), coronal emission-line scans, GONG, (Global Oscillations Network Group); and GONG+, and SOLIS (Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigation of the Sun); • SDAC (Solar Data Analysis Center): a variety of space mission and ancillary data: SOHO,TRACE, Yohkoh, CGROBATSE solar flare data, GOES soft X-ray photometry, SMM, OSO-7 raster images, Solar-B (from 2005), STEREO (from 2005); • Stanford University solar group: SOHO MDI, Wilcox Solar Observatory magnetograms,TON helioseismology database, Mt. Wilson 60-ft. tower data, LOWL helioseismology database

15. Querying methods-----------before

16. Querying methods-----------now

21. Meaning for us to Join VSO • To look toward international front edge, put limited energy in advantaged project. • This would brings us both many new chances and challenges. Through the bridge to the VSO, Chinese solar physical scientist will enjoy latest technologies and astronomy achievement of the worldwide, meanwhile also share our own sources with international colleagues.

22. Our basis • Data: photospheric magnetogram and filtergram:1987.6.12---- now chromospheric magnetogram:1987.6.12----now H-alpha filtergram：1991----now H-beta filtergram：1987.6.12----now full disk H-alpha image:1991----now full disk CaII image:1991----1997, upgrading now full disk photospheric magnetogram: 1991----1997, upgrading now • Data processing: the existence of an extensive software package created by our experiment group

23. Our basis • Network: fiber line in huairou station • security system: firewall, antivirus,etc • Data automatically backup function • Now we are implementing conversion from huairou data model to VSO Data Model

24. Arckitecture of CVSO Users lever assembling level Resource level Construction level

25. Related Web sites • http://solarvirtual.org • http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/grid/egso/software/

26. Thanks for attend the report!