Heliophysics Data Sources -- Sun Science -- it's Really Cool Stuff, and Important to Get Out In The Public Domain

I have always watched these at Suspicious0bservers.   I decided it was finally time to find the sources.

I also use the Helioviewer.    Just type that into any Search Engine.


From the SDO, Coronal Holes are best shown at 193 Angstroms, the default shows 3 views, but you can customize it using the "sprocket gear" thingy, aka Settings.

https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dashboard/ 



And here you get the real time solar wind, including the all important Phi angle

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/real-time-solar-wind


And this perked up my ears today.   They actually called it a G2 magnetic storm.   We havent seen red in months that I can recall.   Quiet sun has been boring. 

That should change as we head into an uptick in sun spots and magnetism (we hope).

NOAA is horrible at predicting things.   From 2007 they had a wide range of predictions....so someone will almost for sure be right!   

Us citizen scientists, though, predicted that our
"average peak" would actually be the lowest predicted curve by NOAA, around 75 as a smoothed average.  There is a lot of variability, so just using the highest peak, would not represent the "strength" of the overall cycle.   It ended up being around 80 on a 20 month smoothed average.

One source for sun spot data is

Source: WDC-SILSO, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels

 http://www.sidc.be/silso/datafiles

 It is amazing how difficult it is to obtain data that is already in a useable format.    This problem also exists with NASA, USGS, and pretty much everyone.   Many tricks to "parse" the data using clunky and quirky Excel methods are always needed.   I guess that is how they protect their domain while posing as providing the information because they are tax payer funded.