On the Importance of an Automated and Modular Solar Image Processing Tool (abstract)

Developing sophisticated software tools is essential to support studies of solar activity evolution, climate change understanding and space weather prediction. With new space missions such as SDO, solar images are being produced in unprecedented volumes. To capitalize on that huge data availability, the scientific community needs a new generation of software tools, which enable automatic and efficient data processing and manipulation. In this work, we argue that a modular system design is required to achieve a stable, extendable and comprehensive solar feature tracking tool.