Speaker
Description
The University of Calgary now operates one of the largest ground-based heliophysics networks in the world: more than 110 instruments including all-sky imagers, riometers, magnetometers, and GNSS scintillation receivers — distributed across 37 sites in northern Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica. Sustaining this network has forced us to solve, and repeatedly re-solve, the full chain of problems that sit between a photon at a remote field site and a figure in a paper: constrained and intermittent connectivity, heterogeneous instrument generations with incompatible data models, calibration provenance that must survive decades, and the tension between rapid quick-look availability and the stability expected of science-grade products.
This presentation offers an operator's perspective on that chain, using our open data platform and the AuroraX conjunction-search and metadata services as concrete examples of what has worked and what has not. We discuss the decisions that proved durable — separating quick-look from science-grade product tiers, treating metadata as a first-class deliverable, and exposing data through programmatic interfaces alongside browsable archives — and the decisions we would make differently, including the real cost of retrofitting standards compliance onto established archives.