Open AccessThe Solar Stormwatch CME catalogue: Results from the first space weather citizen science project
Author(s) -
Barnard L.,
Scott C.,
Owens M.,
Lockwood M.,
TuckerHood K.,
Thomas S.,
Crothers S.,
Davies J. A.,
Harrison R.,
Lintott C.,
Simpson R.,
O'Donnell J.,
Smith A. M.,
Waterson N.,
Bamford S.,
Romeo F.,
Kukula M.,
Owens B.,
Savani N.,
Wilkinson J.,
Baeten E.,
Poeffel L.,
Harder B.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
space weather
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.254
H-Index - 56
ISSN - 1542-7390
DOI - 10.1002/2014sw001119
Subject(s) - coronal mass ejection , space weather , spacecraft , event (particle physics) , physics , tracking (education) , position (finance) , citizen science , meteorology , astronomy , astrophysics , solar wind , psychology , pedagogy , finance , quantum mechanics , magnetic field , economics
Solar Stormwatch was the first space weather citizen science project, the aim of which is to identify and track coronal mass ejections (CMEs) observed by the Heliospheric Imagers aboard the STEREO satellites. The project has now been running for approximately 4 years, with input from >16,000 citizen scientists, resulting in a data set of >38,000time‐elongation profiles of CME trajectories, observed over 18 preselected position angles. We present our method for reducing this data set into a CME catalogue. The resulting catalogue consists of 144 CMEs over the period January 2007 to February 2010, of which 110 were observed by STEREO‐A and 77 were observed by STEREO‐B. For each CME, the time‐elongation profiles generated by the citizen scientists are averaged into a consensus profile along each position angle that the event was tracked. We consider this catalogue to be unique, being at present the only citizen science‐generated CME catalogue, tracking CMEs over an elongation range of 4° out to a maximum of approximately 70°. Using single spacecraft fitting techniques, we estimate the speed, direction, solar source region, and latitudinal width of each CME. This shows that at present, the Solar Stormwatch catalogue (which covers only solar minimum years) contains almost exclusively slow CMEs, with a mean speed of approximately 350 km s −1 . The full catalogue is available for public access at www.met.reading.ac.uk/~spate/solarstormwatch . This includes, for each event, the unprocessed time‐elongation profiles generated by Solar Stormwatch, the consensus time‐elongation profiles, and a set of summary plots, as well as the estimated CME properties.