Properties of Flare-Imminent versus Flare-Quiet Active Regions from the Chromosphere through the Corona I: Introduction of the AIA Active Region Patches (AARPs)

We begin here a series of papers examining the chromospheric and coronal properties of solar active regions. This first paper describes an extensive dataset of images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on the Solar Dynamics Observatory curated for large-sample analysis of this topic. Based on (and constructed to coordinate with) the ``Active Region Patches'' as identified by the pipeline data analysis system for the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on the same mission, the ``HARPs''), the ``AIA Active Region Patches'' (AARPs), described herein, comprise an unbiased multi-wavelength set of FITS files downsampled spatially only by way of HARP-centered patch extractions (full spatial sampling is retained), and downsampled in the temporal domain but still able to describe both short-lived kinematics and longer-term trends. The AARPs database enables physics-informed parametrization and analysis using Nonparametric Discriminant Analysis in Paper II of this series, and is validated for analysis using Differential Emission Measure techniques. The AARP dataset presently covers mid-2010 through December 2018, is approx 9TB in size, and available through the Solar Data Analysis Center.