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🌞 SUNCAST — Software UNified Collaboration for Advancing Solar Tomography

Welcome to SUNCAST, an open-science initiative dedicated to developing a modern, sustainable, and community-driven software ecosystem for advancing 3D studies of the solar corona.

SUNCAST supports research that combines ground-based and space-based remote-sensing observations with physics-based forward modeling, spectral fitting, and data-constrained tomography. The SUNCAST ecosystem is built around interoperable, cloud-ready tools and reproducible workflows that help the community analyze, model, and understand the 3D structure of the solar corona.

🎯 Mission

SUNCAST accelerates scientific discovery by:

  • providing open, interoperable, HPC-ready software tools,
  • supporting the transition from legacy codes to scalable, cloud-capable systems,
  • training early-career researchers and broadening participation (MSIs, PUIs, and beyond),
  • fostering reproducibility and open-science best practices,
  • building a community-owned, community-driven software ecosystem.

Our development practices are guided by the FAIR, CARE, and TRUST principles, ensuring transparency, reproducibility, ethical stewardship, and long-term sustainability.

🧭 Governance & Community

SUNCAST is establishing a Governance Board and community processes that support:

  • transparent decision-making,
  • open participation,
  • long-term sustainability of key workflows,
  • recognition of contributor effort,
  • equitable access to tools and training resources.

You can learn more about how SUNCAST is governed and how to get involved in the Governance and Contributing pages.

🔭 Core Tools & Workflows

SUNCAST currently supports and develops several key tools, including:

  • pyGSFIT — microwave spectral fitting and forward modeling of solar emission,
  • pyAMPP — NLFFF-based magnetic modeling and data-constrained field reconstruction,
  • pyGSK — Generalized Spectral Kurtosis (GSK) toolkit for radio data analysis.

Additional community workflows, real-data pipelines, and training examples will be added as the project grows. See the Projects page for an evolving overview.

🤝 Join the SUNCAST Community

SUNCAST welcomes contributions from:

  • students and early-career researchers,
  • scientists at MSIs and PUIs,
  • international collaborators,
  • anyone interested in open, reproducible heliophysics.

Start by reading our Contributing Guide and Code of Conduct, then explore the projects and repositories hosted under the SUNCAST GitHub organization.

Together, we can build a sustainable, community-owned software ecosystem for solar tomography and heliophysics.