Spaceweather
Welcome to Spaceweather, a daily report of current heliospheric conditions, issued by XMDV Radio and supported by Ozone-Value Holdings.
Spaceweather is generated daily, at time-of-issue of the NOAA's description of the latest solar activity [1]. This data is processed into the spoken portion of the report. In addition, the ambient backing of the report is generated using NOAA X-Ray data from two different satellite sources.
This was created by XMDV Radio, supported by OvZa (Ozone-Value Holdings), in recognition of the importance of Spaceweather public services, as well as the great work of the NOAA.
Sonification
Sonification is the process of turning data from an arbitrary source, into sound.
Pictured on the right are the generated graphs used in the production of the reports backing. With the blue line representing the continuous processed X-ray data and the red line representing the stepped data. The Y-axis represents the number of semitones away from middle-A (440Hz).
This is fed into a SoX-based synthisizer which creates the sound based on some pre-defined parameters. This is an aestetic feature.
Pre-processing
Due to the nature of the raw signal, extensive pre-processing is performed to get it within opperable limits. The signal is normalized to its mean, before the deviation of the data is reduced via transfer function (below).
y = arctan( x / 2w )
Where w is the weighting of that particular source, pre-defined based on its stability.
This helps to reduce the significant spikes in the data that would make this particular set both difficult and boring to listen to. Even still, the sources are not weighted as to remove the spikes completely, but instead amplify the "noise" below the signal.
References
[1] Forecast Discussion. https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/text/discussion.txt
[2] Local-maxima of flux reading (6 hours, satellite 18). https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/json/goes/secondary/xrays-6-hour.json
[3] Local-minima of flux reading (7 days, satellite 16). https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/json/goes/primary/xrays-7-day.json
[4] Local-minima of electron correction (7 days, satellite 18). https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/json/goes/secondary/xrays-7-day.json
[5] Local-maxima of electron correction (7 days, satellite 16). https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/json/goes/primary/xrays-7-day.json