NOAA’s SWFO Program Launching in 2024: Science Objectives and Data Products

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Follow On (SWFO) program will provide continuous coronal and heliospheric measurements to replace the current operational functions of ACE, DSCOVR, and SOHO: In April 2024, Compact Coronagraph-1 (CCOR-1) will be launched onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-U (GOES-U) satellite. In early 2025, a second coronagraph (CCOR-2) and three state-of-the-art in situ sensors will operate at the Sun-Earth Lagrange 1 point on the SWFO-L1 observatory. (For an overview, see Vargas et al., The NOAA-NASA Space Weather Follow On (SWFO) Program to Sustain Operational Space-based Observations of Solar Wind and Coronal Mass Ejections; paper in this conference).

In addition to operational capabilities, SWFO will enable progress in several areas of solar and heliospheric science. Its imagery of the propagation of transient structures (CMEs, HSS, streamers, etc.) through the solar wind and of their radial evolution will be used to model and understand the connections between the corona and the 1-AU region. Research topics include the initial phase of CME acceleration in the middle and outer corona, their relation to precursors, and to concurrent activity such as solar flare occurrence and SEP acceleration. Further, high-resolution plasma moments, IMF components, and suprathermal spectra will be used for modeling, statistical analysis, and AI/ML applications in characterizing the solar wind and identifying its plasma structures. Time series data will be used in driving models of magnetospheric and ionospheric models to quantify solar wind-magnetosphere coupling and the geoeffectiveness of solar wind events, and in validating heliospheric models. Several of these studies are of interest for the Research to Operations (R2O) pipeline that NOAA has established with NASA and NSF.

The SWFO Ground Segment will be making these data products available through a long-term collaboration between instrument developers, SWPC, and NCEI on algorithm development before launch and calibration/validation and anomaly resolution during flight. NCEI has designed the SWFO Science Center, an archive and access portal for all data (Levels 0 to 3). In addition, SWFO is developing user readiness through online resources and through sessions at science meetings and other venues.