GOES

The GOES Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) is NOAA's operational solar extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) imager. This telescope allows forecasters to monitor the Sun’s hot outer atmosphere, or corona. Observations of solar EUV emission aids in the early detection of solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and other phenomena that impact the geospace environment.

The real time SUVI flare location product reports flare locations for the SUVI “flaring” spectral channels (94Å and 131Å) with a 4 minute cadence. Graphical products show flare locations in the Heliographic Stonyhurst coordinate system for the most recent flare location. The SUVI Flare Location JSON data service also includes the flare location in R-theta, and pixel coordinate systems.

The SUVI Flare Locations are determined from the SUVI Thematic Map and, for each distinct flaring region, the algorithm returns the intensity-weighted centroid that indicates the location of each flare. Locations when the GOES X-ray Sensor (XRS) Event Detection algorithm determines that a solar flare is in progress.

For further details, see the following links: 

NOAA NCEI archive of GOES Products and additional documentation

Example Jupyter Notebooks to Plot SUVI Flare Locations

Journal Article on Thematic Map Approach

Latest Primary JSON

Latest Secondary JSON

Alpha particles (helium-4 nuclei) are significant contributors to dose rates during solar energetic particle (SEP) events. Real-time measurements of alpha particle fluxes are required for inputs to models serving the aviation, satellite, and human space exploration industries. The GOES 16-19 alpha particle fluxes are measured by the two Solar and Galactic Proton Sensors (SGPS) on each satellite, the same instrument that measures the solar proton fluxes used by SWPC for solar radiation storm alerts. One SGPS looks eastward, and one looks westward in the orbit. The ion fluxes that are incident on the westward-looking telescopes are least attenuated by the shielding effects of the geomagnetic field. The capability of the spacecraft to perform a yaw flip, which results in a switch of the eastward- and westward-looking directions, drives the requirement for two SGPS units on each spacecraft. The proton fluxes from the westward-looking SGPS are used for SWPC’s solar radiation storm alerts.

From each SGPS, eleven alpha particle energy channels are processed (Table 1). The JSON files contain 5-minute averages of the SGPS alpha particle fluxes at all eleven energies from the SGPS unit that looks westward. The files also contain the lower and upper channel energies. An ‘effective’ center energy can be approximated as the geometric mean of the lower and upper energies, though, strictly speaking, this is only correct for a power law exponent of -2. Background levels from galactic cosmic rays have not been removed from these fluxes.

Note: The energy units in the SGPS files are keV, not MeV, because of the way the GOES SGPS requirements were written.

• To convert channel energies from keV to MeV, divide by 1000.
• To convert alpha particle fluxes from α/cm²-s-sr-keV to α/cm²-s-sr-MeV, multiply by 1000.

To convert alpha particle fluxes from α/cm²-s-sr-MeV to α/cm²-s-sr-(MeV/nucleon), multiply by 4.

differential-alphas-6-hour.json

differential-alphas-1-day.json

differential-alphas-3-day.json

differential-alphas-7-day.json