CEDAR email: DMSP SSIES-2 Database Migration

[Marc Hairston]

DMSP SSIES-2 DATABASE TRANSFERRED FROM UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS TO
MIT HAYSTACK MADRIGAL SYSTEM 

 
Since 2003, the University of Texas at Dallas has provided a public
website to distribute thermal plasma parameters from the SSIES-2
instrument packages on several of the DMSP spacecraft, specifically F11
through F15. These data consist of three-dimensional ion flow velocities,
ion density, ion and electron temperatures, plasma composition, and
quality flags. The server hosting this website at UTD has been retired,
and therefore we have migrated all these data to the NSF supported
Madrigal distributed database system at MIT Haystack Observatory to make
them more easily accessible to the community. Madrigal now hosts all the
single orbit summary data plots generated by the old website, along with
all the data and quality flags that were available on the old website.   
 

The work has also provided a large upgrade in the amount of measurements
available to the community.  Previously, because of budget limitations,
data available on the UTD website was limited to time periods prior to
January 2006.  However, as part of the transfer effort, the Madrigal
database now hosts all SSIES-2 data past that date for DMSP F13 through
F15 platforms.  The expanded SSIES-2 dataset covers the period from 1992
through the present for a total of over sixty satellite-years of data,
although we note that DMSP F15 is the only current operational satellite
in this particular data set.   
 
To access this data, go to 
“cedar.openmadrigal.org” and select
“Access Data” -> “List Experiments” -> “Satellite Instruments”->
“Defense Meteorological Satellite Program”.  Note that this will 
produce
a list of experiment files that include both the newly available UTD
SSIES-2 database (labeled as “UT DMSP with quality flags”) and also the
previously available Level 1 DMSP data (all other files), provided by
Boston College to the Madrigal distributed database system. 
 
Support for 
formatting and the large UTD SSIES-2 database transfer for
the space science community use has been provided at UT Dallas by NSF
grant AGS-1663763 and at MIT Haystack Observatory by NSF Cooperative
Agreement AGS-1242204 to the Millstone Hill Geospace Facility.  For any
questions about these data and about the new Madrigal hosting of the
database, please contact Marc Hairston (UTD) at hairston at utdallas.edu or
Bill Rideout (MIT Haystack) at brideout at mit.edu.