aurora-australis-forecaster

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Note: this project is a work in progress.
A development/proof of concept version is viewable here: http://aurora.nawth.io/ however it may stop working at anytime, or display wildly inaccurate data without any notice. Use with caution until advised otherwise.

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A cross-platform application for aggregating and visualising real-time Aurora Australis forecast data.

Predicting the weather on Earth is still not an exact science, and this becomes more evident when we try to go beyond our own atmosphere - a limitation all "Aurora Chasers" must begrudgingly accept.

With this in mind; this project sets out with the intent to provide tools to identify when there is a substantially elevated probability of seeing an Aurora.

As any predictive model is only as good as the underlying data, we will focus on identifying and communicating the things we know with a reasonable degree of confidence.

Current features

####Charts/Data

• Real-time solar wind data feeds from ACE/DSCOVR satelites
• Collection of live, and forecast charts from NOAA, BOM etc. (TAS magnetometers, 6hr PLASMAG etc.)
• Generate animations of Ovation and CME forecasts etc *(prrof of concept only, planned refactor)
• UTC and local time display *(local time fixed to TAS, we should set by location)

####Maps

• Basemaps (topo, street, satellite)
• Light pollution map (2015)
• Dynamic South Pole (data till 2020)
• Live ISS tracker
• Interactive viewing locations map

####Weather

• Widget to show weather based on location
• Widget to show moon phase info based on location
• Animated satellite imagery map from BOM (national cloud cover)
• Cressy Cam Video feed

####Raw data

• Todo

####Raw data

• Todo

####Raw data

• Todo

Community suggested features

• Contextual data based on locations "as a user I want to see magnetometer/weather etc from my area, or allow me to look at data for other locations"
• User configurable dashboard "as a user I want to be able to modify the dashboard so I only see the data that I'm most interested in"
• Night Vision mode "as a user I'd like to be able to enable a NV mode, to change the interface colours to reduce negative impacts on my night vision in the field"

Planned features

• Time series plot of real-time solar wind data from L1 (ACE/DSCOVR).
• A scoring model to emulate human interpretation of solar wind data (if a few solar wind variables line up, outlook is good etc.), should use some interpolation to smooth null values and brief fluctuations that may trigger give false positives.
• Location search box (support lat/lon search)
• TIPS: Write copy/provide resources/links
• FAQ: Write copy/provide resources/links
• An intelligent alert system that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg
• Leverage best available data.
• App to be delivered via the web, iOS and Android.
• Responsive layout for mobile (this should already be working, need to investigate why not..)
• App free for anybody to use, and code is open source for the Aurora Chaser community.

Technical To-do's

• Switch to AngularJS for ViewModel, going to need more grunt to manage a dynamic dashboard.
• Develop a method to dynamically build dashboard/interface from JSON config.
• Add UI controls to update the config/model.
• Persist and retrieve user specific interface config using HTML5 Local Storage.
• Switch back to DSCOVR services once they stabilise.
• ISS - we should poll service from server-side and push out to client.
• gifshot, scale interval to img count..? Also need pause. This whole thing needs rethinking (also: we should fetch first pic of each animation).
• move REST service polling to server - run code on server, see if we can live update gauges etc.
• alerts..
• pull charts from config

Deployment notes

Currently deployed to AWS EC2 instance using Meteor Up.
Some basic starter notes here: http://sergelobatch.com/slog/2015/4/10/using-mup/

With AWS and mup.json configured:

$ mup setup 
$ mup deploy

If you get deployment errors, check the logs $ mup logs -f

Dependencies

Meteor Packages:

• twbs:bootstrap
• iron:router
• http

Cordova Packages:

• org.apache.cordova.inappbrowser@1.1.1
• cordova:org.apache.cordova.core.device@1.1.0

Other goodies:

• Google Fonts
• FontAwesome Icons
• D3JS

Interested/want to help?

I'm new to whole aurora scene and am simply building this as a way to learn more; I'd greatly appreciate:

• Feature requests - or suggestions of things you think would be useful.
• Data - specifically any live or regularly updated data feeds that would be relevant.
• Help - if you're a developer and are keen to get involved drop me a line or shoot me a pull request.

Notes/useful stuff for Meteor development

• https://atmospherejs.com/ meteor pkgs
• http://bootsnipp.com/ UI snippets for bootstrap
• http://www.favicon-generator.org/ app icon generator for web, ios and android