The Solar Weather Browser (SWB) is a standalone, open-source software tool designed to display solar images with context overlays.
It was originally developed for the space-weather forecast activities of the Solar Influence Data analysis Center (SIDC) but
it is more generally well suited to display the output of solar-feature recognition methods. The SWB is also useful in the
context of distributed solar-image archives, where it could play the role of a quick-look viewer. The SWB allows the user
to visually browse large solar data sets and investigate the solar activity for a given date. It has a client – server design
that minimizes the bandwidth from the network to the user’s monitor. The server processes the data using the SolarSoft library
and distributes them through a Web server to which the SWB client connects. The client is readily available for Linux, Mac
OS X, and Windows at
http://sidc.be/SWB. We discuss the software technology embedded in the SWB as well as its use for solar physics and space weather.
Keywords Sun: software - Sun: database - Sun: public outreach