Space Weather -

Expected Outcome

Commonly occurring space weather events (SWE) have the potential to affect the performance of critical space and ground infrastructure by disrupting operations and communications in multiple sectors of society. In addition, “extreme SWE” could have devastating societal and economic consequences with potential costs for disruptions and damages estimated in tens or even hundreds of billions of Euros.

Space weather technological research for new precursor services: the worldwide goal of space weather activities should be to monitor and forecast SWE just like terrestrial weather. However, direct physical simulation is currently not achievable for an operational Sun to Earth system, due in part to the lack of measurements and to the complexity of the involved processes, as well as different timescales involved. Current space weather models are generally not capable of forecasting events over several days. A longer forecasting horizon would require access to data from new observation infrastructure coupled with new and improved modelling capabilities. Research and innovation activities should address application domains that may include space as well as terrestrial infrastructure. Proposals should include architectural concepts of possible European space weather services in relation to the application domains addressed and they should demonstrate complementarity to Space Weather services developed through the Space Situational Awareness component of the EU Space Programme.

• Prepare Europe for a full exploitation of space weather data by a renewed effort on modelling and forecasting using currently available data.
• Develop concepts to provide space weather data, forecasts and warnings with criteria on (timely) availability, harmonized (data) standards and quality control similar to the best-practices of meteorological services (as e.g. documented by the World Meteorological Organisation WMO).
• Improve scientific understanding of the origin and evolution of space weather phenomena.
• Improving SWE restitution and prediction capabilities using artificial intelligence / deep learning techniques.
• Develop new services for both scientific purposes and terrestrial infrastructure monitoring.
• Acceleration innovation of enabling technologies (maturing, prototyping, on ground tests including exploratory ground based instrumentations research)
• Identified and matured concepts up to TRL 3-4

Scope

• New modelling including ab-initio simulations to understand fundamental Sun-Earth physical mechanisms and their sensitivity to parameter change for improved forecasting skills, and forecasting techniques capable of improving the restitution quality and extending the time horizon of a future space weather forecasting capability to several days.
• Proposals should address the development of modelling capabilities and/or the delivery of prototype services able to interpret a broad range of observations of the Sun’s corona and magnetic field, of the Sun-Earth interplanetary space and of the Earth magneto/iono/thermo-sphere coupling relying on existing observation capacities.
• Validate and harmonize the currently available data from existing services and identify gaps in data and model availability.
• Training of models using deep-learning techniques based on existing large aggregated databases from space measurements.
• Inventory of potential early indicators of extreme space weather events.
• Complementary and coherent activities with the ESA on-going or future activities in particular those decided at the last ESA Ministerial held in November 2019.
• On ground demonstration tests
• Ground instruments: densification of ground instrument networks and development/improvement of new instrument concepts
• Complementary and coherent activities with existing space weather services with a significant involvement of European and national scientific institutions and stakeholders.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.

Activities are expected to achieve TRL3-4 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

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