October 1, 2007 SPACE WEATHER PREDICTION CENTER ANONYMOUS FTP SERVICE ftp.swpc.noaa.gov or from a web browser http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpmenu The Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC http://www.swpc.noaa.gov ) provides Anonymous FTP access to near-real-time and recent space weather alerts, forecasts and summaries, and space weather data indices, lists, plots, and model outputs. As new reports are added, the older are kept online for varying lengths of time. Some SWPC reports and data from 1996 are still available through the FTP server. As a center in the U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA, National Weather Service, the Space Weather Prediction Center is one of the National Centers for Environmental Protection. See our web site at http://www.swpc.noaa.gov for many other space weather presentations, updating pages, educational material, and information about SWPC. Below is a overview of the SWPC Anonymous FTP service and description of the site. At the bottom of the page is a simple automatic FTP script. ****************************************************************** ** Please read the SWPC Disclaimer at http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ ** ****************************************************************** SWPC provides near-real-time and recent data, solar and geomagnetic indices and solar event reports created from preliminary reports. Preliminary data may contain errors or be revised after further review. The historical products in this SWPC Warehouse are the preliminary reports as originally published. SWPC does not encourage the use of preliminary data for research purposes. Links to on-line data at SWPC and archive sites with final data: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/Data/ ****************************************************************** Please send comments and questions to SWPC.Webmaster@noaa.gov Report problems to SWPC.CustomerSupport@noaa.gov =============================================================================== =============================================================================== Anonymous FTP servers: ftp.swpc.noaa.gov is hosted on National Weather Service machines. These servers are available 24 hours a day but are maintained during normal working hours (8am to 5pm MST, Monday through Friday, except holidays). Connect to the anonymous FTP server with the following commands: ftp ftp.swpc.noaa.gov Login: ftp (or anonymous) Password: (Your email address or other identification.) cd pub (change to the public directory) Names and email addresses are not shared outside of SWPC. Privacy Policy -- http://weather.gov/privacy.php General Information - Directories and filenames are CASE sensitive. - Most directories have a README file which describes the directory's content and provide other information of use to customers. For example, README files contain file update times, details about the data sources, filename conventions, and links sites that archive older data. - For each type of data there is often two types of files; a short file with real-time data, and a longer file with all data for a day or month. Real-time data users are asked to use the short files and to avoid frequent downloads of long full day or month files. Top-level Directory Structure NEWS.txt contains news from SWPC about content changes, planned upgrades and data or distribution problems. The /latest directory contains the Latest Solar-Geophysical Data; the most recent reports, summaries, and data lists. Although this information is found elsewhere, this directory serves customers who want the most recent reports. These have static filenames, e.g.SRS.txt is the latest Solar Region Summary report. This files is also in /forecasts/SRS/ but these its named 0324SRS.txt. The /forecasts directory contains sub-directories with the latest and recent Alerts, Forecasts, and Summaries. In these directories the filenames include the date, e.g. 0209RSGA.txt for February 9 Report of Solar and Geophysical Activity. The /weekly directory has 27-day Forecasts & Solar Cycle Progression. The /indices directory has files and sub-directories with the latest and older solar and geomagnetic indices and events. The /lists directory contains sub-directories with ascii list files of space weather data for a variety of instruments, both satellite based and ground based. Most lists are updated as data is received at SWPC. For more information see the README files in the sub-directories. The /plots directory contains sub-directories with 3-day plots of space weather data, mainly from the GOES satellite. These plots are updated as data is received at SWPC and also appear on SWPC's updating Today's Space Weather web page http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/today. The /gallery directory is a collection of interesting solar images. The /sbuv directory contains recent and older MgII Core-to-Wing Index data. The /welcome directory contains this overview files and and old station list. The /warehouse directory was created in February 2005 to provide historical SWPC Products and data plots from 1996. Yearly sub-directories contain compressed files for 6 primary SWPC products, Solar and Geomagnetic Indices, and some SWPC format 3-day data plots. ============================================================================== A simple approach to automatically FTP files from SWPC is shown below. This works from Windows as well as unix and other machines. Create a file named "ftp.txt" with the following lines (be sure to put YOUR email address in the user line!). This example gets the most recent Solar Region Summary and Solar Geophysical Activity Summary from the /latest directory: open ftp.swpc.noaa.gov user ftp you@your.email.address cd pub/latest get SRS.txt regions.swpc get SGAS.txt activity.swpc bye Create an command script file with the following line: ftp -n < ftp.txt When you execute the command script, the latest SRS.txt and SGAS.txt files on the SWPC Anonymous FTP server will be copied to files on your machine named regions.swpc and activity.swpc. An alternative approach is the GNU Wget open source software. See http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/Data/about_data.html#wget for an example and links.