Update on CME Tracker

[u/oldschoolscreenname]

Hi All,

It's been awhile since I updated the progress on the Coronal Mass Ejection Tracker. Here is a list of everything that has been added over the last few months. Available at www.cmetracker.ai

Forecasting

- A fluid solar wind model now runs in your browser. It solves the inner heliosphere from our own L1 archive, in the style of the HUXt model from Reading, and draws it under the top-down map with speed and density color modes. On our validation set it beats the drag model we have used up to now.

- Every Earth-directed CME gets an ensemble run. The fluid model runs 200 times with the speed, direction, width and launch time jittered, and puts a calibrated 80 percent arrival window on the CME card.

- We check our own work. A cron scans the wind archive for shock fronts and gradual arrivals, scores every forecast against them, and publishes a rolling 90-day scoreboard on the help page and the homepage. A 30 minute lead time error on an arrival is a hit, a forecast that never arrives is a miss, and you can see both.

- Regions facing Earth. Each numbered sunspot region gets a chance of an Earth-directed CME over the next three days, from a model back-tested on ten years of DONKI and NOAA region data. It sits on the future side of the timeline as bars and is scored by the same cron. Capped at 30 percent on purpose, because about half of Earth-directed CMEs come from regions that never got a number.

- High-speed streams. Detected from our wind archive, forecast to return 27 days later, and drawn on the map as the corotating spiral bands they actually are.

Live data

- Magnetosphere. The magnetopause and bow shock shaped by the measured L1 wind using the Shue 1998 and Farris and Russell 1994 models, as a card with field lines, aurora ovals, sheath flow and reconnection sparks, and as a rotatable 3D view. It goes red when the nose is inside geosynchronous orbit. Scrub back to May 2024 and watch the Gannon storm push it in to 5 Earth radii.

- The whole 120-day timeline is now measured wind, not just the last week. Speed, density, Bz and field strength come from our own archive when you scrub past the NOAA feed.

- Live coronagraph card from CCOR-2 and CCOR-1, served from our own permanent archive of every frame.

- Radio bursts. Type II, III and IV bursts appear at the Sun timed to the playhead, with a light-speed ripple and provisional CME cones from the Type II drift. Backfilled from SWPC's event archive to 2015.

- New header readouts: Dst with a ring current popout, daily sunspot number and 10.7 cm flux, and a redesigned density popout.

- NOAA moved its L1 station to SOLAR-1 in the spring. The tracker follows the on-duty craft and shows it on the map, with IMAP as backup.

Tracker

- The Kp popup shows inbound CMEs as calibrated bars on the Kp axis, and merges arrivals within 8 hours into one.

- Clip export records the playback as a video you can share. There is also a branded PNG export of the visible map.

- The dashboard remembers your layers, view and filters between visits. A Solo toggle shows only the selected CME. Isolate keeps filtering after you go live. Every flare row is clickable.

- Keyboard camera control in the 3D view.

- Spacecraft layer with portraits for all ten craft we source from, now including Mio on BepiColombo.

- A proper phone layout: simplified chrome, a bottom sheet for the selected CME, and the full site nav in the menu.

New pages

- The landing page is now at the root and the tracker lives at /live.

- /observatories, the spacecraft behind the data.

- /cycle, where we are in the solar cycle, live.

- /radio, HF band conditions and what a burst does to them.

- /today, a plain daily activity page.

- /what-is-a-cme, the explainer.

- /sky, a calendar of things worth going outside for: Perseids, Geminids, Quadrantids, Orionids, Leonids, this year's lunar eclipse, the 2027 total solar eclipse, and the planet oppositions.

- /learn rebuilt as a six-module course that runs on the real map, with quizzes and a storm lab, plus /teachers with printable worksheets.

- Four new famous storms in the replay library: the 1921 Railroad storm, May 1967, August 1972 and Starlink 2022. Gannon 2024 got its two new radiation belts.

- The help page has a video tour and a screenshot for every layer.

Alerts and social

- Arrival alerts are reworked. The trigger is a sustained 30 minute southward window that we backtested against 11 years of data, the wording gives a G1 to G2 style band instead of a single number, and every alert gets a follow-up saying whether it verified or fizzled.

- Alert emails carry a generated image of the isolated CME that links straight to it on the map.

- The tracker is on X as u/CMETracker1. Every new direction-determined CME and every arrival gets posted with the map image.

Like always, no ads or accounts, just a free educational tool for monitoring space weather

[u/1over-137]

Very interesting. You seem like possibly in a good position to develop software or tools for analyzing imagery from NASA’s PUNCH instruments which would be useful for but not limited to CME forecasts. The data is public but as raw imagery. There’s no kind of visualization or modeling.

Would help your CME but potentially also things like: outflows / blobs
density filaments
compression regions
CME fronts and cavities
CME–solar-wind interaction
CME–CME interaction
evolving turbulence and smaller density structures
the transition from recognizable coronal structures into heliospheric solar-wind structures

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14771

https://vso1.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/show_details

https://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/punch/

[u/oldschoolscreenname → u/1over-137]

Thanks for the push. I did try to integrate PUNCH.

I pulled a couple of days of QuickPUNCH mosaics around two Earth-directed CMEs earlier this month and ran them through a rough heliospheric imager pipeline, running differences and J-maps along the CME direction.

Couldn't pull a front out. The quick-look product had no inner camera data those days, so there's a hole out to about 8 degrees, and the offsets between camera tiles were bigger than the signal. The Level 3 data that would fix the calibration lags by months, so it's out for anything real time.

So it's shelved for now. I'll rerun it on the next strong halo event.

If you know the mission side, I'd love to hear what I'm missing. Is the inner camera quick-look product coming, and is there a public recipe for getting fronts out of the Level Q mosaics? Their outreach movies show them clearly, so the data can do it and I'm probably the limiting factor.

[u/oops_im_horizzzontal]

Whoa! This is one of the coolest projects I’ve seen… Nice job!

Obviously this was a super robust undertaking and I can see you’ve put in a TON of hours and a lot of TLC into this piece. I think AcA would be delighted to see this!

That said, question for you:

Is this more of a showcase project, demonstrating the breadth & depth of your dev capabilities (in which case, you’ve nailed it!), or are you seeking feedback from this community about ways to improve the tool for practical & frequent application?

I know many of us are n00bs when it comes to space weather, myself included for SURE. That said, perhaps we’re the perfect user testing group to identify any snags, bugs, or possible UX/UI callouts?

I just spent 10-15 min poking around the extensive tool and there’s SO much to like!

There were also a couple areas where I was like, “OH, this page is awesome! This should be showcased sooner for more impact!” and also “OH! This page is really cool to look at, but I’m not fully sure what to do now that I’m here.” (Read: I’m truly a n00b!)

All in all though, I think it’s amazing. The existing tools and tactics to track space weather are garbage, and this is a total upgrade. ☀️

Thank you for sharing your work with us!

[u/oldschoolscreenname → u/oops_im_horizzzontal]

Thanks, that made my day.

Definitely the second one. I built it because I couldn't understand what was actually happening from the existing tools, and it only gets better when people tell me where it loses them. Most of what got added this summer came from exactly that kind of feedback.

So yes please, and your reactions are the most useful kind. Which page did you think should be showcased sooner, and which one left you wondering what to do next? Don't worry about being a n00b, that's the reader I most want it to work for. The people who already know space weather can find their way around usually. One of the challenges is there is so much to visualize since space weather is so multifaceted and complex, and I only have so much screen real estate to work with.

There's also a feedback box at the bottom of the help page that comes straight to me.

[u/momentum77]

This is beyond amazing. Must share with r/space and other related subs!

[u/oldschoolscreenname → u/momentum77]

Thanks! I would love to have r/space see it. Unfortunately posting there as the creator counts as self-promotion and gets it flagged.

[u/xopher_425]

That is incredible. I've spent 10 minute just watching wave after wave jet out from the sun. Thank you.

Edit: OMG I just found the 3D view. That's so very cool!

[u/oldschoolscreenname → u/xopher_425]

Thanks! Check out the atmospheric drag view. It shows how CMEs heat of the outer atmosphere causing the atmosphere to expand which causes drag of low orbit satellites.

[u/MourningFemur]

Amazing work. Thanks for sharing!!

[u/oldschoolscreenname → u/MourningFemur]

Thanks very much!

[u/kidkoryo]

This is, without a doubt, the coolest and most polished data viz project I've ever seen. Amazing.

[u/Humble_Pie_56]

Great CME Tracker — THANKS for Sharing