SHARP: Near-Real-Time Solar Active Region Magnetic Field Data

SHARP Near-Real-Time Cylindrical-Equal-Area Data is a NASA series providing space-weather quantities from photospheric vector magnetograms. The data includes automatically-identified active region patches with vector magnetic field components, error maps, and other segments, updated every 12 minutes. SHARPs are indexed by time and active region patch number.

Use Cases

• Predicting solar flare activity based on vector magnetic field measurements.
• Tracking active region evolution based on near-real-time updates every 12 minutes.
• Analyzing magnetic field topology based on Bx, By, and Bz vector components.
• Estimating measurement confidence based on provided error maps and disambiguation estimates.

Strengths

• Data is updated near-real-time, with calculations performed every 12 minutes.
• Includes 31 data segments per patch, including vector magnetic field components, error maps, and bitmaps.
• Projected to a Cylindrical Equal Area Cartesian coordinate system centered on tracked regions.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• File formats are BIN and HTML, which may require specialized tools for processing.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Calculated from photospheric vector magnetogram data from the HMI instrument.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 04:54:52.729956; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Solar disk, focusing on automatically-identified active region patches.