Dan Seaton

I am the senior scientist for solar physics in NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, leading the effort to calibrate data from the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) on NOAA's GOES-R line of spacecraft and the upcoming Compact Coronagraph (CCOR) to fly on GOES-U and NOAA's Space Weather Follow-On missions. I help lead our SUVI product development efforts, and also serve as lead scientist for other solar image data products used by NOAA including observations of solar magnetic fields from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) and the Solar X-Ray Imager (SXI) on the previous line of GOES spacecraft. Sometime I talk about space weather and its origins and the solar cycle.

Using SUVI we have made some exceptionally cool observations of never before observed phenomena in the solar corona. Lately we have been exploring the use of SUVI in novel ways to study the middle corona in the extreme ultraviolet. Our recent Nature Astronomy paper on the middle corona generated some media interest. Novel observations that can teach us about the middle corona, have become one of my primary research interests. I am the project scientist on the proposed SunCET CubeSat mission that will help us to understand coronal eruptions in this region using extreme ultraviolet observations.

Prior to joining CIRES and NCEI in Boulder, I worked at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, where I served as Principal Investigator for the SWAP solar imager on the European Space Agency's PROBA2 spacecraft. I am a Co-I for the Extreme-Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) on ESA's Solar Orbiter mission and ESA's formation-flying PROBA3 coronagraph mission.

My research interests include determining how to better calibrated and utilize observations of the sun's atmosphere, the solar corona, and using observations of the corona to better characterize the physical processes that shape and heat it. I am also interested in the processes that cause and drive huge eruptions on the sun that can lead to severe space weather effects in the near-Earth environment. Of particular interest is the process of magnetic reconnection, which can liberate vast amounts of energy stored in the sun's magnetic field to drive these events, which was the subject of my Ph.D. thesis and an ongoing line of research I am working on.

Since the 2017 total solar eclipse I have been a Co-I on a project to observe the solar corona from high-altitude aircraft in both visible and infrared wavelenths. Our work earned some significant media coverage, but the best story was (of course) from our local paper the Boulder Daily Camera.

You can find the SUVI data I have been working on here.