Web-based tool suite for plasmasphere information recovery

Timothy S. Newman, Cuilan Wang, Dennis L. Gallagher


A suite of tools that enable discovery of terrestrial plasmasphere
characteristics from NASA IMAGE Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) images is described.
The tool suite is web-accessible, allowing easy remote access without the need
for any software installation on the users computer. The features supported by
the tool include reconstruction of the plasmasphere plasma density distribution
from a short sequence of EUV images, semi-automated selection of the plasmapause
boundary in an EUV image, and mapping of the selected boundary to the
geomagnetic equatorial plane. EUV image upload and result download is also
supported. The tool suite's plasmapause mapping feature is achieved via the
Roelof and Skinner (2000) Edge Algorithm. The plasma density reconstruction is
achieved through a tomographic technique that exploits physical constraints to
allow for a moderate resolution result. The tool suite's software architecture
uses Java Server Pages (JSP) and Java Applets on the front side for
user-software interaction and Java Servlets on the server side for task
execution. The compute-intensive components of the tool suite are implemented in
C++ and invoked by the server via Java Native Interface (JNI).

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Fall Meeting, American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, U.S.A., 2005