OVATION-PRIME-2013 Met Office Nowcast Verification Dataset

The accompanying data is made available under the terms of the Non-Commercial Government Licence (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/non-commercial-government-licence/version/2/)

The auroral nowcast files have been produced using the version of the OVATION-Prime 2013 (OP-2013) model that was used operationally at the UK Met Office until December 2020. The auroral nowcast data has been hindcast for this study using historic solar wind measurements input to the OP-2013 model.

Model files span 01-05-2000 - 31-10-2002. The model output is provided in magnetic coordinates.
The time in the filename is the time of the hourly forecast cycle output. The time listed at the top of the file is 30 mins prior to the forecast cycle ouput time i.e. the model run time, or time of the input data used to produce the 30 min nowcast.
The data archive also contains a file (log_fail.txt) that logs the forecast cycles which failed during this period due to missing input data.

Column 1 (mlt) is the magnetic local time (MLT) in hours of local time, with a grid resolution of 0.25 hours of MLT.
Column 2 (mlat) is the magnetic latitude in degrees, with a grid resolution of 0.5 degrees.
Column 3 (je) is the auroral flux calculated for each grid cell in erg/cm^2 s.
Column 4 (probabilities) is the probability of aurora occurring in each grid cell as calculated from the auroral flux for each grid cell in Column 3.