Hi Stormwatchers! The science team may have been a bit quiet on the Stormwatch forum of late but that doesn’t mean we’re not still involved. You may have seen the announcement in the forum pages of our first Stormwatch related paper, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This focussed on the detection of interplanetary dust from particle trails seen in HI images. If you want to see how your efforts translated to real science, a preview of the paper can be found at; http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4389 thanks to everyone who spent the time looking at dust! There is a second paper, this time using Stormwatch identifications of solar storms to remove them from the data so that we could look at the effects of high speed solar wind streams arriving at Earth. This paper has been submitted to the Space Weather journal and is currently under review (it is sent to fellow scientists for their comments to ensure that we’re not saying anything incorrect or outrageous). I’ll let you know when I hear more about this. So, we have two publications on the go, with real science informed by your efforts. Thank you so much, we really appreciate your time and efforts but it won’t stop there. Currently we have scientists lined up to take a look at the Stormwatch real-time forecasts generated by you in incoming! and incoming trace-it, and also someone who will be looking at the comet data. This is potentially really exciting as we’re hoping to use observations of the absorption of starlight as the tail drifts across distance starts to tell us something about the particle sizes in the comet tail. Comparing these with observations made in the infra-red by the Herschel spacecraft will hopefully provide some insight into the generation of the very material that we have seen hitting the STEREO spacecraft!
You may also have seen that there was an earth-directed storm that arrived at Earth today without us being able to make a prediction from your clicks. This may have been due to unfortunate gaps in the telemetry from the spacecraft or simply that the spacecraft are now sufficiently far from Earth that making such forecasts for our planet are becoming more challenging. Please keep clicking though, any storm tracked in the science and real-time data is providing us with valuable information on what we will need if we are to accurately predict these storms in future. There is plenty of information left to be mined from our data and we simply wouldn’t be able to do it without you all. Thank you once again for your enthusiasm, efforts and time. It’s such a privilege to be working with you all.
Chris.
The Solar Stormwatch Blog 