Deep learning, which is a subfield of machine learning, has drawn significant interest in recent years. It was originally used in speech recognition (Deng, Hinton, and Kingsbury, 2013), natural language processing (Kastrati et al., 2021), and computer vision (Hu et al., 2018). More recently, it has been applied to astronomy, astrophysics, and solar physics (Liu et al., 2020a; Jiang et al., 2021; Espuña Fontcuberta et al., 2023; Mercea et al., 2023; Scully et al., 2023). Here, we present a new deep-learning method, specifically an attention-aided convolutional neural network (CNN), named SolarCNN, for solar image super-resolution. SolarCNN aims to enhance the quality of line-of-sight (LOS) magnetograms of solar active regions (ARs) collected by the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI; Scherrer et al., 1995) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO; Domingo, Fleck, and Poland, 1995). The ground-truth labels used for training SolarCNN are the LOS magnetograms of the same ARs collected by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI; Schou et al., 2012) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO; Pesnell, Thompson, and Chamberlin, 2012). Training and test samples are collected from ARs in the HMI and MDI overlap period, between 1 May 2010 and 11 April 2011. An AR on the solar disk usually consists of one or more sunspots and pores that are formed because of the concentrations of strong magnetic fields.

In this dataset we provide a comprehensive collection of magnetograms (images quantifying the strength of the magnetic field) from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The dataset incorporates data from three sources and provides SDO Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) magnetograms of solar active regions (regions of large magnetic flux, generally the source of eruptive events) as well as labels of corresponding flaring activity. This dataset will be useful for image analysis or solar physics research related to magnetic structure, its evolution over time, and its relation to solar flares. The dataset will be of interest to those researchers investigating automated solar flare prediction methods, including supervised and unsupervised machine learning (classical and deep), binary and multi-class classification, and regression. This dataset is a minimally processed, user configurable dataset of consistently sized images of solar active regions that can serve as a benchmark dataset for solar flare prediction research.