Research to Operations Visualization for WSA Coronal and Solar Wind Predictions

Abstract

The Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA) Model has served both the research and operational communities with ambient solar wind forecasts for over a decade, but it has lacked an interactive, centralized, and publicly accessible method for visualizing its empirical and physics-based corona and solar wind predictions. A browser-based dashboard has been developed to fill this gap by providing forecasters with the ability to juxtapose recent in situ and remotely sensed satellite observations and model predictions to assess model performance. It will also serve a complementary purpose of science-enablement through investigation of the model’s detailed ensemble predictions from various satellite perspectives and comparison with observations. Visualized data include time series plots of solar wind speed and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) polarity, as well as projected maps of derived coronal holes overlayed on EUV coronal hole and filament observations, the heliospheric current sheet location at 5 solar radii, and probabilistic predictions of satellite-footpoint connectivity. Predictions are available for satellites dispersed throughout the Heliospheric System Observatory, including ACE, STEREO-A, PSP, and SolO. The project has been developed with maintainability and ease of deployment in mind with the Plotly Dash framework in Python, targeted JS functions to reduce latency, Git version control, and Docker containerization.