Radiation Data Portal: Integration of Radiation Measurements at the Aviation Altitudes and Solar-Terrestrial Environment Observations

TL;DR

The Radiation Data Portal is a web-based tool that integrates and visualizes radiation measurements at high altitudes, aiding in space weather analysis and radiation risk assessment for aerospace safety.

Contribution

It introduces an interactive portal that consolidates radiation data from multiple sources with enhanced search and visualization capabilities.

Findings

ARMAS measurements during Solar Proton Events show increased radiation levels.

The portal enables efficient retrieval and comparison of radiation data.

It supports better understanding of space weather impacts on radiation exposure.

Abstract

The impact of radiation dramatically increases at high altitudes in the Earth's atmosphere and in space. Therefore, monitoring and access to radiation environment measurements are critical for estimating the radiation exposure risks of aircraft and spacecraft crews and the impact of space weather disturbances on electronics. Addressing these needs requires convenient access to multi-source radiation environment data and enhancement of visualization and search capabilities. The Radiation Data Portal represents an interactive web-based application for search and visualization of in-flight radiation measurements. The Portal enhances the exploration capabilities of various properties of the radiation environment and provides measurements of dose rates along with information on space weather-related conditions. The Radiation Data Portal back-end is a MySQL relational database that contains the radiation measurements obtained from the Automated Radiation Measurements for Aerospace Safety (ARMAS) device and the soft X-ray and proton flux measurements from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES). The implemented Application Programming Interface (API) and Python routines allow a user to retrieve the database records without interaction with the web interface. As a use case of the Radiation Data Portal, we examine ARMAS measurements during an enhancement of the Solar Proton (SP) fluxes, known as Solar Proton Events (SPEs), and compare them to measurements during SP-quiet periods.