AGHOST's Space Weather Archive

Late last year (2006) I completed a project called the Space Weather Archive. The project was somewhat of a branch of the Paranormal Weather Images project I worked on with Justin Faulk (GhostGadgets.com). The space weather archive includes two components; the archive (of course), and the software designed to provide easy access to the data.


Some Background

Many of you may have seen the space weather images from n3kl.org, or more recently weather.ghostgadgets.com on the websites of many ghost hunting and paranormal research organizations. They typically provide the user with a general status of the Earth's geomagnetic field and the x-ray flux from the Sun. These images are actually produced using data from the Space Environment Center, which is a research laboratory within NOAA.

Data relating to the Earth's geomagnetic field is collected using a number of ground-based magnetometer stations all over the world. X-ray, as well as other relevant data such as proton and electron flux, is gathered using the GOES weather satellites. Data from these sources is constantly pushed to the SEC laboratory and archived on their website. The SEC then uses this data to report and predict significant space weather events.

When filing reports or reviewing old cases, it is often time consuming to dig through the SEC archive and find older space weather data to correlate with the reports. So I began the project of building a web-based front-end to the archive to make access to this data quick and painless.


Accessing the Archive

The archive can now be accessed via a link on the AGHOST home page (see above image). The web interface accepts a single date as input (year, month, and day), and displays data for the entire day. You can then use the available data or plots to break the data down further to determine the results for a particular time of the day. Just be sure to account for the fact that all the data is displayed in Coordinated Universal Time.

Space Weather Results for October 31, 2006

The archive contains space weather data from January 1, 1996 to the present day. Much of the archive for past years is archived locally, on the AGHOSTOnline.org server. Data for the current year, however, is pulled directly from the SEC archive on the fly. Should you run into any bugs or have any questions, feel free to send me an email.