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Abstract Solar–terrestrial physics, the science of interactions between the Sun and the Earth’s environment, is increasingly envisioned as a complex system consisting of regions of very different nature but strongly coupled to each other via multiple physical processes. Over time, a tremendous amount of observational data have been collected on the various solar–terrestrial physics subsystems: the Sun, the solar wind, Earth’s magnetosphere, ionosphere, and neutral atmosphere. Despite the quantity of data, measurements of the near-Earth and solar environments remain sparse with respect to the size of the solar–terrestrial system, implying that multiple datasets often need to be combined to gain insights into the physics at play. Besides, increasingly sophisticated numerical models have been built to elucidate the physics of those subsystems, and ongoing efforts aim at improving the interfacing of such models to get a system-level understanding. The solar–terrestrial physics community is facing the challenge of bringing together its various subcommunities whose combined data and expertise are needed to advance the science. While databases for observations and models exist, they are often catering for only part of the community and may not always follow the same standards and practice in terms of data access. Moreover, database and instrument maintenance requires continuity in funding and human power, posing an additional challenge. In this paper, we review some of the existing initiatives tackling the data challenge as well as emerging new data processing methods. We also discuss some of the current issues related to the production and management of observational data and propose ideas—such as mutualising resources in the form of ‘supersites’ and ensuring continuity in the measurements to overcome those challenges.
Baddeley et al. (Thu,) studied this question.