Mission Statement

The mission of the Solar Weather ESC (S-ESC) is to provide and develop the functionalities, capabilities and expertise in the domain of Solar Weather that are needed within the ESA SWE Network to achieve as a collaborative enterprise its mission of demonstrating and assessing the influences of Space Weather and informing and supporting end-users through the provision of accurate, reliable and timely products and (pre-)operational services, tailored to their requirements. The Solar Weather Expert Service Centre (S-ESC) thus provides, implements and supports the Solar Weather products and capabilities of the ESA SWE network. This includes the observation, monitoring, interpretation, modelling and forecasting of Solar Weather conditions with an emphasis on solar (sub-)surface and solar coronal features, events and processes that drive Space Weather in our solar system.

A stack of PROBA2/SWAP images, radially enhanced off-limb to show the extended corona in full wealth. (© Proba2/SWAP - ESA and Royal Observatory of Belgium)

The source of most Space Weather perturbations can be directly linked to solar activity. Various solar phenomena and their manifestations in the solar wind need to be monitored in order to produce realistic Space Weather predictions. Solar flares, coronal mass ejections and coronal holes are all known to create space weather disturbances under certain conditions which can then in turn affect users' systems.

Phenomena such as these are ultimately driven by the Sun's magnetic field and are therefore regulated by the 11-year solar activity cycle, which is most obviously manifest in the sunspot cycle. High-quality data and state of the art computer modelling are essential tools to understand the processes and causality involved. This is greatly complicated by the fact that the near-Sun and near-Earth regions are rather better studied and understood than the ~150 million km of space in between them.