Connecting Heliophysics Missions to Community-focused Analysis Tools

Abstract

A significant fraction of the effort spent on developing Heliophysics analysis tools happens in the context of mission and instrument development. Funding agencies should encourage or require this development to explicitly look beyond the needs of the mission team, with a focus on creating or bolstering community-focused tools. There is already a trend towards this kind of development, and it lines up well with an increased interest in Open Science at NASA. This paper discusses ways to bolster current trends that are supporting community tool development. Connecting Heliophysics Missions to Community-focused Analysis ToolsBecause Heliophysics encompasses diverse physical regions and phenomena, it is becoming increasingly important to have effective analysis tools that can draw together data from separate conceptual domains and data environments. Over the last decade, NASA and NOAA missions, along with NSF facilities and projects have sought connections between the Sun, interplanetary space, the magnetosphere, ionosphere, atmosphere, all the way down to ground-induced currents. Analyzing data from these different domains requires significant data wrangling. In the next decade, the analysis challenges will increase as instrumentation becomes more capable and data volumes and complexity continue to grow. This white paper offers three recommendations funding agencies can pursue to facilitate community-driven analysis tool development that will support the coming surge in data from both measurements and models. Not all recommendations require more funding -some seek to change the funding emphasis in order to incentivize longer-horizon development, i.e., tools that apply across more than the typical scope of mission and institution.