European Space Weather Prediction Capabilities in Support of Space Situational Awareness

Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Preparatory Programme (PP) is a new ESA programme that was started in 2009. The objective of the programme is to support the European independent utilisation of and access to space research or services. The Mission Requirements for the SSA PP state that the objective of the programme is to support the capacity to securely and safely operate the critical European Space infrastructure and related services. The requirements defined for the Space Weather (SWE) segment of the programme by the European user community expand the scope of the SSA SWE services to also address geomagnetic disturbances and their impact on for example power lines and pipelines. Thus, the space weather services being established within the ESA SSA Preparatory Programme are addressing a wide variety of user domains ranging from background information for the satellite designers to warnings and post-event analysis to satellite operators, radiation environment real-time monitoring and forecast services for human spaceflight support teams, near real-time and forecast services concerning ionospheric disturbances for satellite telecommunication and navigation users, and for example warnings for events of Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GIC) for power line operators. The ESA SSA Programme is building on a large amount of work that has been carried out in a number or national and multinational programmes in Europe. ESA has been strongly involved in the development of the European Space Weather capability. In 2003-2005 ESA carried out a Space Weather Applications Pilot Project resulting in the establishment of the SWENET service to support a large number of Service Development Activities (SDAs) related to monitoring and forecasting of the space weather and its impacts on the infrastructure. Many of the SDAs have now developed into more operational space weather services like the Automatic Solar Activity Prediction (ASAP), European Digital Upper Atmosphere Server (DIAS), Scintillation Quickmaps, Solar Influences Data analysis Centre (SIDC), and many others. The objectives of the SSA SWE Segment include the establishment of an improved system to coordinate and support the development of the space weather services in Europe, to enable well managed and supported user access to the services and to make a long term plan to ensure the availability of the services to the user community.