Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase for the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and Beyond

Abstract

The immense volume of data generated by the suite of instruments on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) requires new tools for efficient identifying and accessing data that is most relevant for research. We have developed the Heliophysics Events Knowledgebase (HEK) to fill this need. The HEK system combines automated data mining using feature-detection methods and high-performance visualization systems for data markup. In addition, web services and clients are provided for searching the resulting metadata, reviewing results, and efficiently accessing the data. We review these components and present examples of their use with SDO data.

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)

“…The basic AIA observables are full-Sun intensities at a range of wavelengths. In combination with the higher-level and metadata products these comprise the data archive which is freely accessible to the research community; the archive and its interfaces (including those for data requests and archive queries) are described by Hurlburt et al (2011).…”

“…Many researchers will make use of the Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO), which has developed a data-distribution architecture that is consistent with the JSOC. The Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase (Hurlburt et al, 2011) will aid users in their search of the SDO event database and also facilitate efficient data retrieval. Additional ancillary databases are made available in the SolarSoft database distribution.…”

A large-scale dataset of solar event reports from automated feature recognition modules

“…These events are reported to the Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase (HEK), which is a centralized archive of solar event reports publicly accessible online (Hurlburt et al 2012). While event metadata can be downloaded manually through the official web interface, 4 for efficient and automated large-scale retrieval, we previously developed an open-source and publicly available software application named ''Query HEK'', or simply QHEK.…”

“…According to the HEK API documentation, 6 each type of event can have numerous optional attributes for characterizing that specific event type (Hurlburt et al 2012). Unfortunately, real-world data does not always conform to documented standards, so here we first focus on what attributes are actually available and what sort of data they provide.…”

“…Automated event detection algorithms of the SDO Feature Finding Team (FFT) (Martens et al 2012) process the continuous stream of image data and report event findings to the public Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase (HEK; Hurlburt et al 2012). With an abundance of generated event reports, we are able to analyze large-scale statistics and facilitate knowledge discovery from data (KDD).…”