Solar image parameter data from the SDO: Long-term curation and data mining

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission captures thousands of images of the Sun per day, motivating the need for efficient and effective storage, representation, and search over a massive repository of data. This work investigates the general-purpose image parameter data produced by the SDO Feature Finding Team's trainable module, which operates at a fixed six minute cadence over all AIA channels. The data contains ten numerical measures computed for each image cell over a 64 x 64 grid for each image. We analyze all available data and metadata produced over the first three years and present comprehensive statistics and outliers while validating the cleanliness and usability of the data source for future research. We then utilize a database of automated solar event reports to create large-scale region-labeled datasets available to the public. We highlight the new-found potential for data-driven discovery by presenting several best-case labeling scenarios that establish a baseline for comparing machine learning classification and attribute (image parameter) evaluation results. Future work focuses on continued dataset curation and spatiotemporal data mining. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.