SW DONKI is a comprehensive Web application for space weather forecasters, scientists, and the general space weather community. It serves as an archive for space weather activities including solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), solar energetic particles, and geomagnetic storms. An innovative feature of the system is the ability to generate, modify, and store complex linkages between space weather events — creating a comprehensive network of relationships between activities, and identifying potential cause-and-effect paradigms for each space weather event. SW DONKI also provides public access to all human-generated event analysis and notifications produced by the Space Weather Research Center (SWRC) forecasting team at CCMC (Community Coordinated Modeling Center).

Prior to SW DONKI, there was no centralized database in existence that allowed SWRC forecasters at CCMC to capture their observed space weather events and notifications. Such information was inefficiently being captured in a blog instead. Consequently, the blog was not easily searchable, and was not a sufficient environment to facilitate discussions or collaborations within the scientific community. With the advent of SW DONKI, SWRC forecasters can now build a catalog of past, present, ongoing, and expected space weather events. With extensive database search functionality, SW DONKI now serves as a valuable resource for spacecraft anomaly resolution activities at NASA, and general space weather research throughout the space weather community.

The design of SW DONKI consists of the database back-end and Web application front-end. The database was designed with modularity in mind. The Web application front-end follows a model-view-controller (MVC) framework architecture. The MVC framework follows the MVC architectural design pattern that separates the data model and business logics from the user interface. Using such a framework naturally encourages modularized code to be written, and promotes code reuse.

This work was done by Chiu Wiegand, Richard Mullinix, and Marlo Maddox of Goddard Space Flight Center. GSC-16878-1