Space Weather and Citizen Science

Abstract

Citizen science promotes public participation in the discovery of new knowledge. Also known as volunteer monitoring or crowd sourcing, this form of public science has taken hold in astronomy, water-quality monitoring, wildlife surveys, and a host of other endeavors. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) devoted one Union session and two Informatics sessions at the 2014 Fall meeting to citizen science. More than 50 meeting abstracts referred to citizen science. In our own community, partnership between amateur and professional scientists is growing. Four recent reports highlight this trend. Three of these appear in Space Weather; the third was presented at the Fall AGU meeting. Figure 1 shows a word cloud capturing the ideas associated with these reports. Barnard et al. [2014, DOI: 10.1002/2014SW001119] describe the Solar Stormwatch (SSW) System, a coronal mass ejection (CME) catalog developed from 4 years of Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) Heliospheric Imager (HI) observations, with inputs from more than 16,000 citizen scientists (CSs). SSW is a collaboration between the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the Royal Observatory Greenwich, and Zooniverse at the University of Oxford, and now continues at the University of Reading. Citizen scientists use game mechanics, tailored for the project, to view STEREO-HI movies to identify and characterize CMEs. Averaging the observations of the CSs allowed them to trace the propagation of the ejecta through the HI field of view. Established methods were then used to estimate the CME speeds and directions. More than 140 CMEs during January 2007 to February 2010 were cataloged. SSW also generated a priori forecasts of Earth-directed CME speeds and arrival times from the space weather beacon mode STEREO-HI data. Tucker-Hood et al. [2014, DOI: 10.1002/2014SW001106] investigated the predictive skill of these forecasts. In a project involving ham radio operators, radio amateurs have voluntarily built networks that monitor transionospheric radio links in real time and report these observations back to central servers. These transionospheric radio links are generated by other hams engaging in friendly (and sometimes competitive) two-way transmissions. Frissell et al. [2014, DOI: 10.1002/2014SW001132] show how the Reverse Beacon Network was used to monitor variations in the high-frequency (HF) propagation paths in an interval surrounding the 13 May 2013 X2.9 solar flare. Prior to the flare, radio operators were using over 1100 HF paths between Europe, North America, South America, and Africa on frequencies from 7 to 28 MHz. As the flare peaked, less than 35% of the paths were available. Effects of the sudden ionospheric disturbance on ham operators lasted for multiple tens of minutes. Frissell et al. argue that CS amateur HF networks can be powerful tools for remote sensing of the ionosphere. Aurorasaurus is a citizen science project that uses the public's observations to track aurora. In her presentation at the Fall 2014 AGU meeting (https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm14/meetingapp.cgi#Paper/28083) E. MacDonald discussed how a team of space scientists, educators, and computer scientists are using auroral sightings to improve space weather models. This National Science Foundation sponsored project aims to provide better real-time notifications of the visibility of the aurora to the interested public via the combination of noisy crowd-sourced ground truth and satellite-based predictions. The website http://aurorasaurus.org monitors tweets about the aurora and supports a platform for explaining and appreciating the dynamics and beauty of the northern lights. Site visitors learn where and when the northern lights are likely to be visible. Further, they can judge whether tweets containing phrases associated with auroral phenomena are likely to be factual reports. Mobile apps, a blog, and a network of volunteer scientists also support outreach efforts. These projects are pathfinders for those of us seeking ways to promote the societal relevance of our discipline and engage with a distributed network of citizen collaborators. The Journal looks forward to publishing results from more projects involving Citizen Scientists. Delores J. Knipp is Editor in Chief of Space Weather and Space Weather Quarterly. She is a Research Professor at University of Colorado Boulder, and holds an appointment as Senior Research Associate with the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Email: dknipp@agu.org. Space Weather 10.1002/2015SW001167KNIPP