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16 Years of GPS Space Weather Data Made Publicly Available (sciencemag.org)
"It's not often that a scientific discipline gains a 23-satellite constellation overnight," reports Science magazine, describing 16 years worth of radiation measurements from GPS satellites finally released by Los Alamos National Lab. "Although billions of people globally use data from GPS satellites, they remain U.S. military assets."
Scientists have long sought the data generated by sensors used to monitor the status of the satellites, which operate in the heavy radiation of medium-Earth orbit and can be vulnerable to solar storms. But few have been allowed to tap this resource... That attitude changed in October 2016, when the outgoing Obama administration issued an executive order aimed at preparing the country for extreme space weather. Such bursts in charged particles, originating in a solar flare or coronal mass ejection, could disable the electrical power grid or divert flights away from the Arctic, where radiation exposure is heightened. The GPS data, which dates from December 2000, fill a hole in studies of space weather, the complex interplay of Earth's magnetic field with bombarding radiation from cosmic rays and the sun.
Like how much weather is there in space?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
It takes a while to falsify the data.
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They present the data as 23 folders with over 100 ASCII at 5 MBs each. Downloading each one by one is annoying but not a show stopper, but why not compress?
I downloaded one of the files and used 7Zip to throw it into a Z archive. The size went from 5 MB down to 500 KB. I uncompressed to make sure it wasn't a fluke but was 100% accurate.
Shouldn't we expect a little more from the country's best and brightest? I mean, come on...
Mom! he started it!
I downloaded the entire dataset folder and compressed into a two-part ZIP for easy download and/or archiving to DVD.
Files are available on Amazon S3 here:
GPS+Energetic+Charged+Particle+2016-12-08+63GBs.zip.001
GPS+Energetic+Charged+Particle+2016-12-08+63GBs.zip.002
Keep in mind that the total folder is over 63 GBs and 8000 files.
But what we could really use is the next 16 years of space weather.
It's the frelling military. If it wouldn't benefit whatever corporate board they're going to sit on after they retire the generals won't allow anything that might serve the public good to escape.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
NASA did the same thing several times during the Shrub mAdministration. At one point they were told to turn off some aging space probe, Pioneer I think. Not "stop monitoring" but "turn it off so that no one else can monitor it" (not that anyone else has the equipment), and were openly annoyed that the ability to do so didn't exist. Repeatedly NASA was instructed to **destroy** data, which they did only after handing a copy over to other parties (generally the Planetary Society). In at least one case staff was instructed that it would be considered cause for dismissal to allow distribution of the data (the early Pioneer data tapes), which they defied.
I'll never understand the conservative mindset. "If I can't make use of it then no one else will be allowed to." I just don't get it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
underwater has its own kind of "weather" so why wouldn't above the atmosphere have "weather" (used as shorthand for a measure of the ambient conditions in X).