VirES for Swarm – Virtual Research Environment

VirES for Swarm [1] is a data manipulation and retrieval interface for the ESA Swarm constellation mission data products. It includes tools for studying various geomagnetic models by comparing them to the Swarm satellite measurements at given space weather and ionospheric conditions.

The list of the provided Swarm products is growing and it currently includes MAG (both, LR and HR), EFI, IBI, TEC, FAC, EEF, and IPD products as well as the collection of L2 SHA Swarm magnetic models, all synchronized to their latest available versions.

VirES provides access to the Swarm measurements and models either through an interactive visual web user interface or through a Python-based API (machine-to-machine interface). The latter allows integration of the users' custom processing and visualization.

The API allows easy extraction of data subsets of various Swarm products (temporal, spatial or filtered by ranges of other data parameters, such as, e.g., space weather conditions) without needing to handle the original product files. This includes evaluation of composed magnetic models (MCO, MLI, MMA, and MIO) and calculation of residuals along the satellite orbit.

The Python API can be exploited in the recently opened Virtual Research Environment (VRE), a JupyterLab based web interface allowing writing of processing and visualization scripts without need for software installation. The VRE comes also with pre-installed third party software libraries (processors and models) as well as the generic Python data handling and visualization tools.

A rich library of tutorial notebooks has been prepared to ease the first steps and make it a convenient tool for a broad audience ranging from students and enthusiasts to advanced scientists.

Our presentation focuses on the introduction of the new Virtual Research Environment and recent VirES evolution.

[1] https://vires.services