The Earth's radiation environment is a subject of primary importance in the study of Space Weather from scientific, operational, and commercial points of view. A decision-impacting example of using advanced scientific knowledge to improve human safety is to obtain accurate estimates of the radiation doses received during aircraft flights. To increase the accessibility of the relevant data, we provide intuitive access to the radiation measurements obtained from the Automated Radiation Measurements for Aerospace Safety (ARMAS) project.
The Automated Radiation Measurements for Aerospace Safety (ARMAS) project uses a micro dosimeter to gather data for Earth science research and for improving aerospace safety. The ARMAS team has deployed and obtained data from these dosimeters flown on agency and commercial aircraft as well as high altitude balloons and commercial suborbital vehicles. The data can be retrieved in real-time, downlinked to the ground, and used in the validated Nowcast of the Atmospheric Ionizing Radiation for Aerospace Safety (NAIRAS) radiation environment modeling program. Combined, the ARMAS data into NAIRAS is called the RADIAN radiation weather data cube. These data lead to significantly improved accuracy in the radiation doses and dose rates along the flight tracks. ARMAS has thus laid the groundwork for an automated and reliable system to monitor the natural galactic, solar, and other radiation environment at commercial aviation flight levels, thereby making a significant contribution toward enhancing U.S. and international aviation safety.
The Radiation Portal data can be requested via API (HTTP GET requests). The API documentation can be downloaded below.
We thank the ARMAS project team for the high-quality radiation environment data. We thank the GOES satellite team for providing the high quality soft X-ray and proton flux measurements. The OpenLayers API is distributed under the BSD 2-Clause License. Copyright 2005-present, OpenLayers Contributors All rights reserved. The Bootstrap API is distributed under MIT license. This work is supported by NASA.