In this paper, we present a method to automatically detect and track solar features from ground-based observations realized at Paris/Meudon Observatory. The detection and tracking methods initially developed at BASS2000 for filaments detected in the Halpha line has been extended to active regions in the Ca k3 line and sunspots in the Ca k1 line.

A database model has been designed to describe in details all types of detected features as well as to take into account their tracking information. The database is remotely accessible from IDL via a webservice. The production of Meudon Carrington map will now be resumed soon.

The worldwide network of standardized neutron monitors is, after 50 years, still the state-of- the-art instrumentation to measure variations of the primary cosmic rays in the energy range 500 MeV-60 GeV. These measurements are an ideal complement to space based cosmic ray measurements. Unlike data from satellite experiments, neutron monitor data is often available only from the individual station's website, in varying formats, and not in real-time. To overcome this deficit, the European Commission is supporting the Real-time database for high resolution neutron monitor measurements (NMDB) since January 2008 as an e-Infrastructures project in the Seventh Framework Programme in the Capacities section. Neutron Monitor stations that do not yet have 1-minute resolution will be supported by software and the development of an affordable standard registration system to submit the measurements to the database via internet in realtime. This resolves the problem of different data formats and for the first time allows use of realtime cosmic ray measurements for space weather applications. Besides creating a database and developing applications that use this data, a part of the project is dedicated to create a public outreach website to inform about cosmic rays and possible effects on humans, technological systems, and the environment.

The satellite PROBA2, built in Belgium and to be launched next year, is an ESA micro-mission for the purpose of demonstrating new technologies, e.g. diamond photodetectors. It will carry the radiometer LYRA that will measure the solar flux in four selected UV passbands chosen for their relevance to aeronomy, space weather and solar physics: (1) the 121.6 nm Lyman alpha line, (2) the 200-220 nm Herzberg continuum range, (3) the 17-80 nm Aluminium filter range, (4) the 1-20 nm Zirconium filter range. Irradiances will be observed in high temporal resolution; integration time can take values between 10 s and 0.01 s. - The poster will show the data that can be expected from LYRA; simulations were performed using data from instruments already in space. The current state of the pre-flight calibration will be demonstrated, and the planned LYRA data products will be explained.

The main aims of the ILWS programme are to stimulate, strengthen, and coordinate space research to understand the governing processes of the connected Sun-Earth System as an integrated entity. In support of these goals, the End Users Task Group was created in order to ensure that the views of those who use solar-terrestrial data for engineering applications ("space weather end users") are reflected within the programme. The task group has undertaken a workplan including the following key tasks:

It is well known that particles from the Sun released into the interplanetary medium through eruptive processes called CMEs are responsible for a significant contribution to the radiation environment in space. There is increasing need for accurate modelling of these particles with miniaturisation of instruments and electrical components making them more sensitive as well as further manned missions planned and interest from the aviation industry. The Solar Energetic Particle Environment Modelling (SEPEM) project for ESA/ESTEC is an international collaboration between the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BISA), the Catholic University of Leuven, QinetiQ, the University of Barcelona and the University of Southampton. It aims to provide a unique collection of data relevant to the modelling of solar energetic particle events including heavy ions as well as solar protons in the 5-200MeV energy range which are most significant for spacecraft designers. A selection of tools will be available for processing the data from a raw form into a clean form; this will be as automated as is viable. The system will provide an interface to statistical models for predicting long term environment characteristics, effects tools and predictions of the environment at locations in the heliosphere away from 1AU.

Here we present the work done so far in the development of the MySQL database system and some of the statistical tools which have already been incorporated into the SEPEM system. This includes a tool for automatically extracting Solar Proton Events (SPEs) from a selected time series. Furthermore, we present the planned future development for the system and highlight the capabilities of this engineering tool that will be of use to spacecraft designers and space weather community researchers alike.

Space Weather Service for pipeline operation has been developed by NRCan as follow-on of the proposal submitted to ESA AO in 2002. Since then, the service successfully operates for approximately 5 years. Due to its universality (user chooses the date and location of the pipeline anywhere in Canada and defines basic pipeline structure), this service has more applications than has been originally thought.

For example, because the generation of the electric field values was the intermediate step of the service, we have decided to make the results of the geoelectric field calculations available on-line separately. These intermediate results have been extensively used by external and internal users. The example of unusual case is: it has been used to initially assess GIC variations on the proposed railway on Baffin Island in response to the request from industrial company.

Requests have been received to expand our service to cover US locations and the most remote user came recently from Argentina. The consulting company has been comparing data collected during pipeline survey in Andes with produced by our on-line tool. The resemblance was marginal but as a conclusion the new project might be starting soon.

Because this service uses the geomagnetic data as one of its main inputs, it can be easily expanded to any area where the geomagnetic data are provided. Perhaps, to expand it to cover European countries might be the obvious next step.

In the frame of the Solar Terrestrial Center of Excellence, the Royal Observatory of Belgium has decided to revive its radioastronomy facilities located in the belgian ardennes, in Humain, by developing, in collaboration with its international partners, a new set of solar radio patrol instruments consisting of radiospectrographs and radiometers at fixed frequencies.

A sweep-frequency radiospectrograph built by the ETH group in Zurich is now observing, since June 2008, in the 45-875 MHz range and is part of an international network of identical instruments called CALLISTO. Data from this instrument are already accessible through the CALLISTO-network website, and are in the process of being integrating in the framework of the space-weather forecast activities of the Royal Observatory.

We will present the current development and observations, and outline the envisioned development scheme for the radiometers at fixed frequencies.

The Forbush decrease occurrence in the nucleonic component of galactic cosmic rays was investigated by using the SVIRCO neutron monitor (Rome, Italy) data for several solar activity cycles. A catalogue of Forbush events with amplitude greater than 4 percent was prepared and the associated characteristic parameters derived. A summary of the obtained results is presented for their use in Space Weather (This work is supported by the ESS2 project of the Italian Space Agency under contract N. I/015/07/0).

The INGV manages different kind of observations of the upper atmosphere and since several decades it has been collecting digital data from middle and high latitudes. This big amount of information is now organized in a proper database, able to contribute to scientific and technological improvements at national as well as at international level in the field of telecommunications and space weather. The electronic Space Weather upper atmosphere (eSWua) system is capable of supporting the acquisition, elaboration, evaluation, sharing and archiving of multi-instruments observations of the ionized atmosphere. The dynamic web site www.eSWua.ingv.it gives real-time access to ionosonde, riometer and GPS TEC and scintillation data, also providing some useful tools for the visualization of the ionospheric conditions over the polar regions of both the hemispheres and over the Mediterranean area.

The eSWua is the outcome of a big effort of manpower, time and funds motivated by the awareness that geoscience has to rely on structured digital data and on appropriate scientific procedures developed ad hoc by experts opened and shared among the international community.

Some examples regarding the monitoring and investigation of the ionospheric scintillations are shown to demonstrate the potentialities of the system.

The multifunctional particle spectrometer (MPS) has been designed as a general purpose radiation monitor for future ESA space research missions. The MPS provides: identification of electrons, protons and alphas by the dE/dx versus E method, energy and angular reconstruction of incoming particles. The base-line design consists of a two layer silicon pixel tracker and a CsI(Tl) scintillation crystal read out by a photodiode.

A readout scheme consisting of a 32 channel ASIC is proposed for the tracker read out. All signals are digitised immediately and FPGA programmable logic is used to apply: the digital signal processing algorithms, perform on-line data analysis, and deliver the results to the instrument's interface. The data analysis results in energy and angular distributions for the different identified particles.

This article describes the base line design for the MPS. Its performance has been investigated with prototype calibration tests with proton and alpha beams and with Monte Carlo simulations. The MPS provides good particle identification and energy resolution for protons and alphas in a large continuous energy range. Besides the instrument description, flight opportunities and prospects for measurement of the earth radiation environment will be discussed.

The results of permanent registration of GIC in the power systems of the Kola Peninsula (Russia) are presented. We have registered DC in dead-grounded neutral of the power autotransformer at the power system substations of 110-330 kV class. We use specialized database to store the data. It also provides interaction with various scientific computing applications to perform common data handling tasks. The data analysis is done in accordance with the level of magnetic activity. We present examples of geomagnetic disturbances that produce effects on power lines and the statistical distribution of events for 2003 - 2008 as well. The GIC in auroral zone appeared at the average and high levels of activity (Kp=4-9) in the evening and night hours.

The European Space Weather Portal (ESWeP) is an integrated website providing a centralized access point to the space weather community to share their knowledge and results. A large section is devoted to education and outreach as a service for the general public. The portal provides also cross-links to existing websites. While most articles are published in English, some are accessible in Armenian, Danish, Finnish, French, Greek or Slovene.

URL: http://www.spaceweather.eu/

Space weather services can be made available to the potential users in different ways. We focus here on interactive services, i.e. services which cannot be considered to be simply the end result of a processing chain. We discuss the following alternatives:
- offer the services in the form of a web application, executed on the provider's server;
- offer the services through a compiled stand-alone application, running on the user's systems;
- offer the services by publishing the software in the public domain, and having it executed on the user's systems, something that may require third-party software.

We weigh the pros and cons of these alternatives, in terms of software reliability, verification, ease of deployment, version control, portability, performance, and proprietary rights, based on our experiences with the SPENVIS space weather services system (http://www.spenvis.oma.be/) and the MIM space science data processing and visualization package (http://www.spaceweather.eu/en/software/mim).

The state of the ionosphere is modified by a number of different phenomena occurring in the Sun - Earth environment. The day-to-day variability of maximum electron concentration in the F2 layer is mainly attributed to the changes of solar X, EUV radiation, solar wind and geomagnetic activity. Various meteorological processes also influence the ionosphere significantly; meteorological influences can sometimes be comparable in their effect to the effect of geomagnetic activity. The high frequency continuous Doppler shift sounding system located in the Czech Republic makes it possible to monitor ionospheric oscillations in the short period range. The cross-correlations between Doppler shift records and the variations of geomagnetic field at the observatory Budkov usually showed high values for ionospheric oscillations of periods from 1 to 3 minutes. Such oscillations occurred practically simultaneously on all Doppler measuring paths. Short period ionospheric oscillations caused by infrasonic waves of meteorological origin have so far been observed rarely in the Czech Republic, waves of periods 2.5 - 5 minutes of meteorological origin occurred only in few cases during extreme tropospheric weather. The occurrence rate has been much lower than reported in previous studies based on measurements performed over the USA.

Recognition and cataloguing of the the solar phenomena influencing a space weather condition is important for progress in this branch of a science. The quality of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (observed by coronographs) has reached a high precision nowadays. We present a new type of solar weather service at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. Recently solar imaging telescopes have found a new set of the phenomena important for space weather. They vary in morphology, often has weak intensity and almost invisible on the solar flare bright background. It is possible to call them generally “the Solar Disk Eruptions Signatures”. Since 2006 we track them in real time. For this purpose we created a NEMO tool (Novel EIT wave Machine Observing). Here we present the full catalog of EUV Coronal Waves seen by SOHO, STEREO-A, STEREO-B satellites during International Heliophysical Year period (March April 2008).

Through the ESA Education Office, the Agency has recently announced the selection of 9 CubeSat projects to fly on the maiden flight of the Vega launcher, late 2008 to early 2009. The 9 CubeSats will be accommodated in 3 P-POD deployment systems mounted on the payload interface of Vega's AVUM upper stage. Each 1kg CubeSat will be deployed into a high inclination, low Earth orbit and is expected to operate in orbit for up to one year using a small ground station based at the respective University. These projects will provide opportunities for students to get involved in both the construction of the CubeSat itself and exploitation of the data. More than half of the successful CubeSats include an element of space weather related measurements. These CubeSats will be presented together with the relevant data and their expected availability for exploitation in the context of both educational and professional space weather analysis. Preliminary plans for coordinated data exploitation will be considered. Based on these CubeSats and other recently flown examples, the paper will also consider the broader feasibility of using CubeSat platforms as a basis for making space weather measurements.