  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.
