The Heliophysics Coverage Registry: An integrated metadata system for coordinated, multi-mission solar observatories

TL;DR

The Heliophysics Coverage Registry (HCR) is a standards-based system that integrates metadata from multiple solar observatories, enabling coordinated data discovery and analysis of solar features and events across ground and space-based instruments.

Contribution

This paper introduces the HCR, a novel integrated metadata system that facilitates coordinated solar observations and data discovery across multiple missions and observatories.

Findings

Supports IRIS and Hinode instruments and ground observatories

Enables flexible searches of observation metadata and solar features

Improves coordination and discoverability of solar observation data

Abstract

Modern studies of the Sun involve coordinated observations collected from a collage of instruments on the ground and in orbit. Each instrument has its own constraints, such as field of view, duty cycle, and scheduling and commanding windows, that must both be coordinated during operations and be discoverable for analyses of the resulting data. Details on the observed solar features, i.e. sunspots or filaments, and solar events, i.e. flares or coronal mass ejections, are also incorporated to help guide data discovery and data analysis pipelines. The Heliophysics Coverage Registry (HCR) provides a standards-based system for collecting and presenting observations collected by distributed, ground and space based solar observatories which form an integrated Heliophysics system. The HCR currently supports all instruments on the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) and Hinode missions as well as associated ground-based observatories. Here we present an overview of the HCR along with details on how it provides scientists with tools to make flexible searches on observation metadata in coordination with searches of solar features and events.