Collaborative Research: CEDAR: Swarm over Poker 2023--An Auroral System-Science Campaign Exemplar of Archiving and Aharing Heterogeneously-Derived Data Products

This collaborative project, involving Dartmouth College, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and SRI, will explore and develop a new data infrastructure through the system-science use of a Swarm-over-Poker 2023 auroral observational campaign. The team will create new and powerful combined data products from this heterogeneous, distributed, multipoint data set and develop a data-sharing platform to share the derived heterogeneous data products and algorithms with the community. These data are interwoven into new, featurized data products and maps for both ionospheric model ingestion and ML studies. These products and tools will enable studies addressing science questions such as how and to what extent the auroral environment context (activity level, local time, latitude) controls the specifics of pre-midnight arc-scale auroral activity and coupling. This is timely as our community moves toward true system-science efforts that require a diversity of data to greatly advance our understanding of auroral generation and electrodynamics. The novelty of this project is that it will demonstrate the design of a research infrastructure for sharing and archiving derived data products from heterogeneous sources to enable new science for cross-scale cross-region coupling auroral studies. Graduate and undergraduate students will be supported by this project. The students exposed to this project will learn to work with heterogeneous and “multifaceted” CEDAR system science, interweaving multiply-distributed data with featurization tools, and with modelling, as needed for cross-scale cross-region coupling auroral studies. The project will host a series of virtual community discussions to engage with the broader geospace community. Swarm-over-Poker 2023 provided the opportunity to collect in situ ionospheric current and flow data from the ESA Swarm spacecraft, during nightly conjunctions with Poker Flat Research Range (PFRR), Alaska, from mid-February through the end of March 2023. The PFRR data include filtered auroral imagery, Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter Radar (PFISR) radar data, ground magnetometry, and additional instrumentation. The Swarm in situ data include thermal ion plasma flow data and field-aligned current data. From this heterogeneous, distributed, multipoint data set, the team will create new and powerful data products to address auroral system science by data-driving ionospheric models. The three science objectives are (1) an auroral system-science study of 2- way arc-scale vs regional-scale coupling for nightside auroral arcs using the winter 2023 Swarm-over-Poker campaign dataset. (2) Generation of tools for, and the data products of, ionospheric model-absorbable imagery-derived and imagery-guided heterogeneous data products for this campaign, and for shared public use. (3) Using this CEDAR-science driven study as a testbed for designing a new data infrastructure for using and sharing heterogeneously-derived CEDAR-science data products. Specific science questions to be addressed are (1) How, and how much, does the regional auroral environment constrain the details of specific arc-scale features? (2) What is the effect on the regional auroral environment, from arc-scale event signatures? This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.