Innovative Information Technology for Space Weather Research

Solar activity, summarized descriptively as space weather, is closely related to the near Earth environment. Changes in space weather can have adverse effects on many aspects of life and systems on Earth and in space. This project uses innovative computation and information technologies for real time space weather monitoring and forecasting to help government and industry prevent these adverse effects.

The project has three components. (1) Technologies of image processing and pattern recognition, such as image morphology segmentation, Support Vector Machines (SVMs), and neural networks are used to detect and characterize important solar activities in real-time. Automatic forecasting of Earth-directed coronal mass ejection from the sun and subsequent geomagnetic storms will be possible based on such detection and real time reporting of solar events. (2) State-of-the-art parallel computing techniques are combined with phase diversity speckle imaging techniques to yield near real-time diffraction limited images to study solar activity and space weather in a way that could not be done before. (3) Web based software tools are being developed to post processed data, events and forecasting in real time, and to be integrated with solar activity and space weather prediction Web pages.