Explore space weather and the heliophysics big year through the Community Coordinated Modeling Center’s (CCMC) hands-on tools and collaborations

The Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has developed comprehensive resources and initiatives to support the Heliophysics Big Year (HBY) during the approach to solar maximum. This paper details the CCMC’s extensive outreach efforts from October 2023 through December 2024, engaging diverse audiences including the general public, educators, and scientific communities. Key activities included partnerships with the Intrepid Museum and American Museum of Natural History, educational presentations reaching over 1,000 physics educators, and specialized workshops for high school teachers. The paper also highlights significant technological enhancements to the CCMC’s visualization capabilities, specifically the improved Integrated Space Weather Analysis (ISWA) system with its global synchronization features and specialized layout options. Additionally, we discuss the collaborative development of OpenSpace, a versatile 3D visualization tool that integrates data from observations, simulations, and space missions to support public engagement through planetarium shows and educational initiatives. Through these combined efforts, the CCMC has established multiple pathways for audiences to engage with heliophysics research and better understand space weather phenomena during this period of heightened solar activity.

1 Introduction

The Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) supports heliophysics educational endeavors and has developed new resources for the public to engage with the Sun during the year leading to a solar maximum. The CCMC is a hub for model developers around the world, allowing the community to freely engage with world class heliophysics models. The CCMC has become an internationally recognized group facilitating space weather model research to operations over the past 25 years. Models hosted at the CCMC span across the heliophysics domains from the Sun to Earth. They support efforts across the research community including the International Space Weather Action Teams (ISWAT) initiatives and various time period study challenges to help advance research to operations back to research. The Heliophysics Big Year (HBY), a celebration of heliophysics and scientific outreach, provided the CCMC with an opportunity to engage with a broader community than the traditional scientific groups. Brand-new resources are now available on the CCMC’s website¹ to engage with the Heliophysics Big Year (HBY)², the global celebration of solar science. This paper reviews selected efforts from the CCMC to highlight efforts to celebrate the HBY by describing outreach opportunities, tool updates, and collaboration efforts.

2 Heliophysics big year activities

2.1 Outreach activities

The CCMC participated in many outreach activities to help celebrate the Heliophysics Big Year. During the time period from October 2023 through December 2024, the CCMC participated in a variety of activities that highlighted the excitement of heliophysics to multiple audiences. These audiences included the general public, educators, and members of the scientific community. Overall, these outreach activities allowed members of the public to engage with heliophysics events and excited the community about upcoming missions.

2.1.1 General public outreach events

The CCMC partnered with the Intrepid Museum, and CCMC Project Support Specialist Elana Resnick helped staff the table at the Girls In Science and Engineering Day (GSED) on Saturday, 9 March 2024³. The organizers sent the following note after the event: “In total, we had over 1,500 people in attendance at GSED, 834 of them being under the age of 18! Youth are the future, and you helped make so many futures a little bit brighter. Your devotion was noticed and greatly appreciated by our team and The Intrepid Museum.” This event allowed more members of the public in the New York City area to be properly prepared for the upcoming solar eclipse by providing safe solar glasses for the first 200 attendees and providing the other attendees with pinhole projectors.

Another event was the Frontiers Lecture: Space Weather at the American Museum of Natural History on 12 March 2024⁴. The lecture featured solar scientist Leila Mays and OpenSpace developer Elon Olsson, both from the CCMC. The program included information about the Artemis program, an overview of space weather, and how scientists help keep astronauts safe in human exploration. There was a special add-on to the program to showcase what a solar eclipse looked like from different locations on Earth and on the Moon. According to the organizers, there were 390 people in attendance for this program.

2.1.2 Educator outreach events

Elana Resnick also presented “Learn about the Heliophysics Big Year events such as the eclipse through NASA’s Community Coordinated Modeling Center’s (CCMC) tools” on 16 March 2024 at the Spring 2024 Meeting of the Chesapeake Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers (CSAAPT). She presented how to use the CCMC’s tools to see the exciting events around the HBY. There were approximately 20 educators in attendance, additionally, there were a total of around 100 attendees that were able to access the information presented in the sessions.

Elana presented “Explore Astronomy with Community Coordinated Modeling Center’s Educational Heliophysics Tools” on 10 July 2024 at the 2024 Summer Meeting for the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). According to the MIT Physics Department, “[over] 1,000 physics educators from around the world gathered to learn and share the latest advances in their field, make professional connections, and engage with research in the science of learning and teaching physics.”⁵ The presentation included information on heliophysics, space weather, and a basic overview of CCMC tools the educators could bring into their classrooms to share space weather information with their students.

Elana led a 2-h workshop at Rutgers University for 16 high school physics teachers on “An Introduction to Space Weather from an Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) approach” on 28 September 2024. She led the teachers through a historical analysis of space weather events using NASA data and the Community Coordinated Modeling Center’s (CCMC) tools such as their Integrated Space Weather Analysis (ISWA) system. The ISLE approach engages the students in active learning, where the students analyze data and perform experiments to learn concepts. From Eugenia Etkina’s Millikan award lecture, this approach is a “system of learning physics that engages students in active learning, not just of the concepts and laws of physics, but more importantly in the processes that mirror processes that physicists use to construct these concepts and laws” (Etkina, 2015). This was challenging for an approach to space weather education, where most of the information is presented in a lecture format.

These educator outreach events allowed teachers to engage with space weather topics that many of them had not engaged with in the past. Several teachers followed up with the presenter during periods of increased space weather activity, or when they heard through their news sources that there may be a possibility of seeing the aurora near them.

2.1.3 Scientific community outreach events

On 6 June 2024, there was a session titled “Empowering Community Open Participation in the HBY Campaign” at the 2024 CCMC Workshop⁶. This session included talks titled “Introduction: Solar Max HBY Campaign”, by Janet Kozyra, “Database of storms at CCMC. Using ISWA and DONKI for collaborative analysis of superstorms”, by Yihua Zheng, “Telling superstorm stories with ISWA to a broader audience”, by Elana Resnick and Laura Brandt Edson, and “Telling superstorm stories with OpenSpace”, by Elon Olsson, Liz MacDonald, Anders Lundkvist, and Carter Emmart. After the presentations, some of the presenters stayed on for a panel conversation with the attendees to discuss HBY as an example of a community-wide open endeavor. Some of the information from the discussion is listed at a Google Doc⁷ that was populated during the meeting.

Additionally, the CCMC had representatives attend various other meetings in the scientific community. At the 2024 American Geophysical Union meeting, a poster ‘Explore space weather and the Heliophysics Big Year (HBY) through storm narratives using Community Coordinated Modeling Center’s (CCMC) hands-on tools’ shared the new Heliophysics Big Year webpage at the CCMC (Resnick et al., 2024). Additionally, these updates were shared in a poster at the American Meteorological Society meeting in 2025 (Resnick et al., 2025).

2.2 Integrated space weather analysis (ISWA) updates

The CCMC has enhanced their Integrated Space Weather Analysis (ISWA)⁸ system with several key features to enable the community to analyze dynamic time periods including great storms. The improved ISWA system now supports global synchronization of images and timelines to enable easy illustration of the onset and evolution of storms to a broader audience. It has improved support allowing users to design layouts focusing on specific physical phenomena, like solar flares, along the Sun-to-Earth path to make it easier to communicate to a larger variety of audiences. This flexibility enables the educator to tailor the display to tell the story of the storms, describe key physical processes, and communicate this complex chain of space environment phenomena in a targeted fashion.

2.3 OpenSpace project updates

The CCMC also collaborates with Linköping University, Sweden, the American Museum of Natural History, New York University, and the University of Utah to develop OpenSpace⁹. OpenSpace serves as an interactive and free 3D visualization tool that can be run from personal laptops to planetariums. OpenSpace dynamically integrates data from observations, simulations, and space missions, particularly using results from heliophysics simulation models hosted at CCMC. We will describe a pilot of this tool that adapts the original software for global visualization of new datasets. OpenSpace offers diverse visualization capabilities, including real-time satellite positions, trajectories, and heliophysics simulations. It is extensively utilized by CCMC for public engagement through planetarium shows visualizing space weather simulations and data. Additionally, it is used at exhibits: for example, one at the Embassy of Sweden in Washington, DC.

OpenSpace also supports educational initiatives and citizen science projects through various collaborations. One collaboration is with Aurorasaurus, a research project within the New Mexico Consortium supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA (MacDonald et al., 2015), which generates a real-time, global map of auroras via participatory science reports on its website. This collaboration allowed OpenSpace to integrate citizen science aurora data, enabling global visualization of auroral activity during the May 2024 geomagnetic superstorm, thereby enhancing scientific understanding and public awareness of the Northern and Southern Lights (MacDonald et al., 2026, in preparation). You can see an example of this integration in Figure 1 where the icons on Earth display where a citizen saw an Aurora and what color it was.

Figure 1

Figure 1. Screenshot of OpenSpace visualization of Aurorasaurus data. The icons on Earth indicate locations where aurora sightings were reported. The red line represents the estimated visibility boundary of the aurora, while the red oval shows the Ovation Prime model predicted auroral location. The legend in the lower-left explains the color coding used for auroral sightings, the auroral oval, and the red visibility boundary. In the upper-left, the panel displays the date and time, a plot of the magnetopause location from the Block-Adaptive-Tree-Solarwind-Roe-Upwind-Scheme (BATSRUS) MHD model (Gombosi et al., 2021) at that moment, and the corresponding observed Kp index.

Recent developments of OpenSpace also include the incorporation of all-sky camera data through a partnership with the University of Calgary’s Transition Region Explorer (TREx), one of the leading auroral imaging facilities for remote sensing of the near-Earth space environment. For this implementation, we worked closely with the TREx team to integrate data from their RGB all-sky cameras, which provide continuous, continental-scale nighttime observations of the aurora across North America. You can see an example in Figure 2 which visualizes the all-sky camera photos displayed on Earth in the exact location they were taken in and stitched together to create a larger display of the aurora.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Screenshot of OpenSpace rendering of all-sky camera auroral imagery. Each all-sky photograph is projected onto Earth at the camera’s location, rotated to its proper orientation, and blended with neighboring images to form a stitched, large-scale representation of the aurora.

Together, these integrations enhance both scientific understanding and public awareness of the Northern and Southern Lights. These initial, project-specific efforts lay the groundwork for future iterations of OpenSpace that will incorporate additional datasets from around the globe, improving our ability to study the near-Earth space environment and expanding opportunities for heliophysics outreach and engagement. These visualizations have also been presented at two different scientific conferences to a combined audience of roughly 200 participants, further broadening their impact within the research and outreach communities.

In addition to these collaborations, a new visualization is being developed in OpenSpace using output from the SAMI3 ionospheric model. This ongoing effort focuses on rendering the three-dimensional structure of electron density around Earth, combined with field lines that trace the planet’s magnetic configuration during the May 2024 geomagnetic superstorm. The approach aims to provide an immersive view of ionospheric dynamics during geomagnetic storms. The visualization is intended to support researchers in examining electron density variations and to provide educators and the public with a new way to explore ionospheric dynamics.

3 Discussion

Through these outreach activities and technological enhancements, the CCMC has successfully leveraged the Heliophysics Big Year to expand public engagement with heliophysics and space weather phenomena. The combination of hands-on educational events reaching over 2,900 participants, strategic partnerships with museums and educational institutions, and the development of accessible visualization tools like the enhanced ISWA system and OpenSpace has created multiple pathways for audiences to connect with heliophysics concepts. By providing educators with practical classroom resources, enabling citizen science participation through aurora observations, and offering scalable visualization platforms from personal laptops to planetariums, the CCMC has fostered ongoing connections for ongoing space weather education and public outreach. These efforts not only celebrate the solar maximum period but also build lasting educational infrastructure that will continue to inspire future scientists and inform the public about the dynamic relationship between the Sun and Earth.

Author contributions

ER: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. AL: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. MK: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. LM: Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing. YZ: Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing. JY: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. CW: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. RM: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. EO: Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing. EM: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. LE: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. BG-L: Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing. ED: Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing.

Funding

The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. The CCMC Workshop was supported under NSF AGS-2423907. Aurorasaurus is supported by NASA CAN Award #80NSSC19K1609 and by the NSF under grant AGS-1823622.

Acknowledgements

ER, AL, M. MK, M. LM, YZ, JY and CW acknowledge support of CCMC from NASA Heliophysics and the NSF.

Conflict of interest

Author ER was employed by ASRC Federal.

The remaining author(s) declaresd that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Correction note

A correction has been made to this article. Details can be found at: 10.3389/fspas.2026.1786286.

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The author(s) declared that generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

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Footnotes

¹https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov

²https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/research-community-support/HBY/

³https://intrepidmuseum.org/2024-03-05/intrepid-museum-host-girls-science-engineering-day

⁴https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/adults/frontiers-lectures/space-weather

⁵https://physics.mit.edu/news/physics-education-group-at-aapt-summer-meeting-2024/

⁶https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ccmc-workshops/ccmc-2024-workshop/

⁷https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AnRzMMLxtioahuxMJy3K_6DG7g_UIMQhUU2TVK7xzuE/edit?tab=t.0

⁸https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/tools/ISWA/

⁹https://www.openspaceproject.com/

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