SMARPs

We derived Space-weather MDI Active Region Patches, or SMARPs, from maps of the solar surface magnetic field taken by the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) aboard the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SoHO). These data include maps that track every solar active region observed by MDI, along with keywords that describe the physical characteristics of each active region. These data are stored in a publicly-available, web-accessible pSQL database at Stanford University. We describe these data in detail in Bobra et al. 2021, published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

We designed the SMARP data for use in concert with another data product called the Space-Weather HMI Active Region Patches (SHARPs, Bobra et al. 2014), derived from photospheric magnetic field data taken by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument aboard the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory. Combined, the SMARP and SHARP databases provide a continuous, seamless set of active region data from 1996 until the present day.

Users can access these data with a SunPy affiliated package called drms. If you use drms in your research, please cite The SunPy Community et al. 2020 and Glogowski et al. 2019. We released v0.1.0 of this repository and published it on Zenodo as .

Contents

This repository contains two folders. The example_gallery folder contains several notebooks and functions designed to help users understand the SMARP data and how to use the SMARP and SHARP data together. The paper folder contains notebooks that reproduce the figures and analysis in the SMARP paper (Bobra et al. 2021). To use these notebooks together with all the requisite Python packages, create a new conda environment called smarp using the provided smarp.yml environment file like this:

> conda env create -f smarp.yml

Example Gallery

• The notebook Create_SMARP_and_SHARP_maps_with_SunPy.ipynb is a good place to get started. This notebook queries SMARP and SHARP data using the SunPy affiliated package drms, generates a Pandas dataframe of all the associated keyword metadata, and creates SunPy Maps of the SMARP and SHARP image data.
• The notebook Compare_SMARP_and_SHARP_bitmaps.ipynb compares the activity bitmaps in the SMARP and SHARP data sets. The activity bitmaps encode the spatial distribution of the active regions -- called TARP and HARP regions, respectively -- as well as additional information about magnetic field strength and, for the TARP bitmaps, photometric features observed in the continuum intensity data.
• The notebook Extract_SMARP_and_SHARP_maps_from_full-disk_data.ipynb shows how to extract the SMARP and SHARP partial-disk maps in Helioprojective Cartesian coordinates directly from full-disk maps.
• The notebook Compare_SMARP_and_SHARP_coordinates.ipynb shows how to map a coordinate in the SHARP data to the same physical feature in the SMARP data. It also explains how optical distortion in the MDI data limits the ability for high-precision alignment between the two data series.
• The notebook Coalign_SMARP_and_SHARP_maps.ipynb shows how to co-align SMARP and SHARP magnetic field maps.
• The functions in calculate_smarpkeys.py calculate spaceweather keywords from the line-of-sight magnetic field data in the SMARP series. Sample data are included in this repository under the files directory.

Paper

• The notebooks Figure1.ipynb, Figure2.ipynb, and Figure3.ipynb reproduce the three figures Bobra et al. 2021.
• The notebook Matching_TARPs_and_HARPs.ipynb shows how to match HARP regions with TARP regions during the overlap period when both MDI and HMI took data. The SMARP and SHARP data overlap for half a year, between 1 May 2010 and 28 October 2010.

Citation

If you use the Space-weather MDI Active Region Patch data in your research, please consider citing our paper (Bobra et al. 2021):

@article{Bobra_2021,
	doi = {10.3847/1538-4365/ac1f1d},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4365/ac1f1d},
	year = 2021,
	month = {sep},
	publisher = {American Astronomical Society},
	volume = {256},
	number = {2},
	pages = {26},
	author = {Monica G. Bobra and Paul J. Wright and Xudong Sun and Michael J. Turmon},
	title = {{SMARPs} and {SHARPs}: Two Solar Cycles of Active Region Data},
	journal = {The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series}
}