SDO Overview

Since its launch in 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO; (Pesnell et al. 2012) has continuously monitored Sun's activity, delivering a wealth of valuable scientific data for heliophysics researchers with the use of three instruments:

1. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA; Lemen et al. 2012), which captures 4096 x 4096 resolution images (with 0.6 arcsecond pixel size) of the full Sun in two ultraviolet (centered at 1600, and 1700 Å), seven extreme ultraviolet (EUV; centered at 94, 131, 171, 193, 211, 304, and 335 Å), and one visible (centered at 4500 Å) wavelength band.
2. The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI; Schou et al. 2012) captures visible wavelength filtergrams of the full Sun at 4096 x 4096 resolution (a pixel size of 0.5 arcsecond), which are then processed into a number of data products, including photospheric Dopplergrams, line-of-sight magnetograms, and vector magnetograms (Hoeksema et al. 2014).
3. The EUV Variability Experiment (EVE; Woods et al. 2012) monitors the solar EUV spectral irradiance from 1 to 1050 Å. This is done by utilizing multiple EUV Grating Spectrographs (MEGS) that disperse EUV light from the full disk of the Sun and its corona onto a 1024 x 2048 charge coupled device (CCD).

The SDOML Dataset

The SDO ML Dataset (covering 2010 - 2018) was originally published as Galvez et al (2019), and is hosted on the Stanford Digital Repository in Numpy's compressed array format (.npz).

In this notebook, we present an update to the work outlined in Galvez et al (2019), in which the full dataset has been converted to cloud friendly Zarr format. Specifically, SDO/AIA data has been updated to account for a change in calibration after 2019. In addtion to the change in calibration, this updated format includes:

1. FITS header/keyword information (such as observation time, and exposure time).
2. processes for continually updating the data until the present day.

Who is the SDO ML Dataset for?

The sheer volume of structured scientific data recorded by SDO (over 18 PB, and counting) is ideal for a range machine learning tasks (from time-series, to computer vision), as well as more traditional approaches.

While the level 1 data are easily accessible, pre-processing these data for scientific analysis often requires specialized heliophysics (and instrument-specific) knowledge. This may act as an unnecessary hurdle for non-heliophysics machine learning researchers who may wish to experiment with datasets from the physical sciences, but are unaware of domain-specific nuances (e.g., that images must be spatially and temporally adjusted).

This notebook demonstrates the process for interacting with a subset of the curated SDO (AIA, HMI, EVE) dataset, that is mission-ready for machine-learning applications. Our aim is to supply this standardized dataset for heliophysicists who wish to use machine learning in their own research, as well as machine-learning researchers who wish to develop models specialized for the physical sciences.