The Solar Stormwatch CME catalogue: results from the first space weather citizen science project

Barnard, L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9876-4612, Scott, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6411-5649, Owens, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2061-2453, Lockwood, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7397-2172, Tucker-Hood, 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. and Harder, B. (2014) The Solar Stormwatch CME catalogue: results from the first space weather citizen science project. Space Weather, 12 (12). pp. 657-674. ISSN 1542-7390 doi: 10.1002/2014SW001119

Abstract/Summary

Solar Stormwatch was the first space weather citizen science project, the aim of which was 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 >16000 citizen scientists, resulting in a dataset of >38000 time-elongation profiles of CME trajectories, observed over 18 pre-selected position angles. We present our method for reducing this data set into aCME 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 degrees out to a maximum of approximately 70 degrees. 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 kms−1. The full catalogue is available for public access at www.met.reading.ac.uk/spate/stormwatch. 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.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/38405
Identification Number/DOI	10.1002/2014SW001119
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Uncontrolled Keywords	CMEs;Citizen Science;STEREO
Publisher	American Geophysical Union
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