The JSOC Catalogues
Overview
The JSOC catalogues contain information of interest
to the broader Cluster community. These catalogues are written in NASA's
Common Data Format
and transferred to the co-located
UK Cluster Data Centre, from where the
Cluster Data Management System disseminates them to the other National
Data Centres of the
Cluster Science Data System. This approach to catalogue
dissemination is broadly similar to that used to disseminate Cluster Prime
and Summary Parameters but with some important differences as discussed
below.
There are five types of JSOC catalogue as follows:
-
Predicted Geometric Positions (PGP) catalogue - a
single catalogue containing time-tagged records at five minute intervals
giving predicted values of geometric parameters such as the positions
and separations of the Cluster spacecraft and quality parameters for size
and shape of the spacecraft configuration.
-
Predicted Magnetic Positions (PMP) catalogues - up
to four catalogues, one for each spacecraft, containing time-tagged records
at five minute intervals giving, for each spacecraft, the predicted values
of magnetic coordinates such as invariant latitude, magnetic field strength
and the magnetic local time.
-
Predicted Scientific Events (PSE) catalogues - up
to five catalogues, one for each spacecraft and one for their centroid,
giving the times and other attributes of scientific and orbit events that
those spacecraft are predicted to encounter.
-
Identifed Scientific Events (ISE) catalogues - up
to four catalogues, one for each spacecraft, giving the times and other
attributes of scientific events encountered by those spacecraft (as determined
by JSOC examination of Cluster prime parameter data).
-
Predicted Solar Cycle Trends (PCY) catalogue - a
single catalogue containing time-tagged records at monthly intervals giving
the observed and predicted values of various solar cycle indices such as
the International Sunspot Number index.
The first four catalogues are produced as monthly files, i.e. one instance
of each catalogue covers a period of a month. The last catalogue (solar
cycle trends) is produced as a single file covering the whole mission.
The time coverage of these files is very different to the daily coverage
of the equivalent prime and summary parameter files.
These catalogues supersede the equivalent Oracle catalogues that were
disseminated to the CSDS National Data Centres as part of the Cluster-I
activities of JSOC. Those Oracle catalogues were disseminated within the
framework of the Cluster User Interface (using the Oracle snapshot mechanism
for table replication). For Cluster-II, the Cluster User Interface has
been replaced by the Cluster Data Management System and the CDF-formatted
versions of the JSOC catalogues are a direct replacement for the functionality
that the Oracle catalogues provided to end users.
Catalogue Production
The CDF catalogues are all generated from tables in the JSOC Planning Database,
which is stored under Oracle as it was for Cluster-I. This generation is
a three-stage process.
-
we execute an SQL script that extracts the necessary data from Oracle and
outputs it into an ASCII file using the
Intermediate File Format (IFF)
developed by the
UK Cluster Science Centre.
This format is designed especially
for loading data into CDFs that are fully compliant with both:
-
we generate an empty CDF file using the SkeletonCDF program provided as
part of the CDF toolkit and the CSDS-approved skeleton files for each catalogue.
These have been designed by the UK Cluster Science Centre in consultation
with JSOC and are formally subject to CSDS configuration control.
-
we load data from the IFF file into the empty CDF file using the
qiff
program developed by the UK Cluster Science Centre.
These steps are all commanded by a single shell script (one for each catalogue
type) that invokes the three steps and provided the necessary control to
scan over cases where we must consider multiple spacecraft (for PSP, PSE
and ISE), to handle error conditions detected at any stage of the process
and write appropriate information to the log files.
Catalogue Access
The JSOC Catalogues are available via the
Cluster Science Data System (CSDS).
Use the
CSDS access point locator
in order to link to the National Data Centre that can best provide
access to these catalogues.
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