| Presentation Title: | Owens Valley Solar Arrays: An Integrated Community Facility for Solar and Space Weather Research |
| Author(s): | Bin Chen, Dale Gary, Gelu Nita, Sijie Yu, Pascal Saint-Hilaire, Gregg Hallinan, and the EOVSA and OVRO-LWA teams |
Abstract:
We introduce the Owens Valley Solar Arrays (OVSAs) as an integrated facility to serve the solar and space weather community. OVSAs consist of two state-of-the-art radio telescopes located in the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO), namely the Expanded Owens Valley Solar Array (EOVSA) and the OVRO Long Wavelength Array (OVRO-LWA), which work in complementary wavelength regimes (EOVSA: microwaves in 1-18 GHz; OVRO-LWA: meter waves in 15-88 MHz). Together, they work in concert to probe a wide range of altitudes in the solar atmosphere from the upper chromosphere to the low corona as well as eruptions to ~6 solar radii (i.e., the “middle” corona). OVSAs provide unique and unprecedented spatial, temporal, and spectral imaging of a wide range of coronal heights to advance the study of various key solar phenomena, including solar flares, active regions, jets, filaments, and coronal holes. Equally importantly, they inaugurate a new means of studying coronal mass ejections (CMEs) via near-real-time spectral imaging from their birth near the solar surface to their development in the middle corona. We will provide an overview of the broad science topics that OVSAs address, the status of the instrumentation (including the NSF-funded EOVSA upgrade project), the observing modes, the data processing pipeline, and the spectral imaging data products we provide to the community. We will also discuss our efforts to broaden and strengthen our support for both expert and general users of the facility.