International Community Coordination in Space Weather

Understanding and predicting space weather and its impact on society is acknowledged as a global challenge. To address the need to join forces and to maximize return on efforts the COSPAR Panel on Space Weather (PSW) facilitated establishment of a network of International Space Weather Action Teams (ISWAT). ISWAT serves as a global hub for community coordinated topical collaborations focused on different aspects of space weather including advancing understanding, assessment and improvement of modeling capabilities, transitioning advances in research to operations, optimized utilization of available observations, and generating inputs to future instrumentation deployment. The initiative is building upon established efforts by engaging existing international teams. ISWAT also facilitates emerging of new teams and leads, and enables community to speak with a global voice to international organizations and national agencies. One of the major ISWAT pre-cursors is the International Forum on Space Weather Capabilities Assessment. Action teams are organized into ISWAT clusters based on domain, phenomena, impact, or overarching activity. Cluster moderators and teams leads facilitate coordination of intra- and inter-cluster activities.

To facilitate on-line presence of this community-driven initiative the COSPAR PSW is hosting an interactive website (https://www.iswat-cospar.org) built with a content management platform. The homepage main’s ISWAT image menu (see the attached screenshot) shows ISWAT clusters that cover Solar (S), Heliosphere (H) and Geospace (G) domains. Each cluster (S1-S3, H1-H4, G1-G3) shown in the image is a link to dedicated webpage that contains information about cluster goals and links to entry pages of registered action teams. The “Join ISWAT” page contains interactive forms for team registration and for joining registered teams.

Near term plans include: expanding the community-wide pre-event Space Weather Prediction Methods Scoreboard (https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/assessment/scoreboards.php) to a broad range of essential space environment quantities; establishing a process for updating a COSPAR/ILWS space weather Roadmap [Advances in Space Research, 2015: DOI: 10.1016/j.asr.2015.03.023], transforming the Roadmap into a living document, and developing an extensive information technology infrastructure to support collaborative projects through a centralized database and an interactive web-based framework. The presentation will review the current status of the ISWAT initiative and plans for upcoming community-wide campaigns.