NEWS ABOUT SEC'S POES WEB PAGES (03/09/2001)

Auroral Activity
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We have upgraded our near real-time data processing system to ingest
data from more than one operating POES satellite in order to provide the 
most current estimate of auroral activity.  Data from both NOAA-15 and 
NOAA-16 are now being processed with the most recent observations used to 
make the activity estimate.  In the near future we plan to incorporate 
data from NOAA-12 and NOAA-14 as well.

Using the most recent data obtained from any of the POES satellites
will alleviate the problem of long time intervals when one satellite is 
out of contact with a ground receiving station and no new data are
obtained.

Because of storage limitations, the "Recent Data Plots" link will
continue to display only observations from one satellite, currently 
NOAA-15.

New Energetic Particles Page: Solar Protons
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A new page has been added to the the Energetic Particles page:
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/tiger.  To view this page, go to the URL, then
click on the 'Solar Protons' button on the left side.

The Solar Protons page will show, when a solar proton event is in
progress, the extent of the area in each polar region that will be
affected by these high-energy protons.  These protons cause degradation
of HF communications.  When no solar proton event is in progress (and
they are rather infrequent) little or no change will be seen on these
plots.