Revisiting the Solar Research Cyberinfrastructure Needs: A White Paper of Findings and Recommendations

TL;DR

This white paper reviews the current state of solar research cyberinfrastructure, emphasizing the need for metadata standardization and improved data handling to support data-driven discoveries in solar physics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances, identifies future infrastructure needs, and offers recommendations for standardizing solar data and improving cyberinfrastructure.

Findings

Current data handling approaches face significant problems.

Community consensus on top-level recommendations has been achieved.

Examples of existing cyberinfrastructure are summarized.

Abstract

Solar and Heliosphere physics are areas of remarkable data-driven discoveries. Recent advances in high-cadence, high-resolution multiwavelength observations, growing amounts of data from realistic modeling, and operational needs for uninterrupted science-quality data coverage generate the demand for a solar metadata standardization and overall healthy data infrastructure. This white paper is prepared as an effort of the working group "Uniform Semantics and Syntax of Solar Observations and Events" created within the "Towards Integration of Heliophysics Data, Modeling, and Analysis Tools" EarthCube Research Coordination Network (@HDMIEC RCN), with primary objectives to discuss current advances and identify future needs for the solar research cyberinfrastructure. The white paper summarizes presentations and discussions held during the special working group session at the EarthCube Annual Meeting on June 19th, 2020, as well as community contribution gathered during a series of preceding workshops and subsequent RCN working group sessions. The authors provide examples of the current standing of the solar research cyberinfrastructure, and describe the problems related to current data handling approaches. The list of the top-level recommendations agreed by the authors of the current white paper is presented at the beginning of the paper.