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2.12.0

SWE Portal 2.12.0 Release Note

The ESA SSA Space Weather team is pleased to announce that SWE Portal 2.12.0 was released on the 28 May 2019. In this update the pages describing the Solar Weather, Heliospheric Weather, Space Radiation and Ionospheric Weather Expert Service Centres (ESCs) have been redesigned to provide more information about the ESCs and the teams participating.

The ESC pages now also include an area where users can access demonstration products. Demonstration products are new products made available for an initial testing period before being incorporated into the SWE services. All users can register to access the demonstration products, please check the miscellaneous area on the registration/application preferences page for access. Your feedback is welcome! Find the list of newly released demonstration products at the end of this release note.

Additionally, the SSA SWE Services have been enhanced with the incorporation of the following new and updated products and tools listed below. Access the services via the Service Domains section of the SWE Portal.

Not sure which products are linked to which service? Find the latest Service-Product linking here: Service Application Matrix

From the Solar Weather Expert Service Centre:

  • Solar Influences Data Analysis Center, Royal Observatory of Belgium provides:
    • Solar radio light curves: The Humain Solar Radio Spectrometer (HSRS) is a Software Defined Radio receiver, which is plugged to a Sun-tracking broadband antenna in Humain (Belgium). The HSRS observations are rather unique radio observations in Europe that cover a large frequency range including the ones used by the air traffic controllers and some of the GNSS services. This product offers real-time information about the intensity of the solar radio flux at those specific frequency bands.
    • Sunspot number forecast: The SIDC/SILSO (Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations) produces 12 month predictions of the monthly smoothed sunspot number using three different methods. For each of the methods, there is also a Kalman filter optimised version available.
    • Automated coronal hole detection: Coronal holes are automatically detected in EUV solar images from SDO/AIA data at 193 Angstrom using the SPoCA suite software and a set of characteristics are extracted, including: area, time of the first and last detection in observations and location.
  • Institute of 4D Technologies, University of Applied Sciences North Western Switzerland provides:
    • Solar flare forecast: FLARECAST uses a machine learning algorithm to compute for a given point in time the probability of occurrence of a solar flare within the next day.
    • An updated URL for the e-Callisto product. Note the old URL will stop functioning at the next Portal release.
  • Research Center for Astronomy and Applied Mathematics, Academy of Athens provides:
    • Updates to the A-EFFort Flare forecasting product, which now provides an archive query functionality as well as API access to the forecast data. (Please note this update includes modifications to the URLs from which this product is served. The old URLs will cease to work from this Portal release onwards.)

From the Heliospheric Weather Expert Service Centre:

  • Centre de Données de la Physique des Plasmas provides:
    • The CDPP Heliopropa service which gives access to a heliospheric propagator for solar wind prediction at various targets in the Solar System based on a 1D magnetohydrodynamic propagation model.
  • Technical University of Denmark provides:
    • AWARE NEXT, for automated prediction of the potentially geo-effective solar wind disturbances called co-rotating interaction regions (CIRs) and the associated trailing high-speed streams (HSSs), estimates the risk for occurrence of CIRs in L1 within the next 24 hours. The associated most likely development in solar wind speed and interplanetary magnetic field intensity is also provided.

From the Space Radiation Expert Service Centre:

  • The Space Research Laboratory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Turku provides:
    • A heavy ion fluence model based on SOHO/ERNE heavy ion measurements between 1997 and 2015. The model provides high-energy heavy ion fluences in the near-Earth interplanetary space integrated over the mission for a user-specified mission length (0.5-7 years) and confidence level (e.g., 90, 95, 99%) in three differential energy channels between 13 and 100 MeV/n for He, two differential energy channels between 25 and 100 MeV/n for CNO, and one differential energy channel between 50 and 100 MeV/n for heavier ions up to Fe.
  • Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London provides:
    • A new empirical model of the electron number flux of the 10 eV to 40 keV electrons at LEO for different levels of solar wind velocity or geomagnetic activity has been developed based on the NASA Van Allen Probes HOPE data. The existing models at GEO and MEO based on the ESA Cluster II PEACE data have been updated using an improved flux renormalisation.
  • Centre for Space Radiations, UniversitĂ© Catholique de Louvain provides:
    • Updates to the product group EPT. Improvements were made to the visualisation of the time series products along with additional improvements to the web interface and the headers of the data files. Expected fluxes from models were added to the measured characteristic spectra: AE8-MIN and AE8-MAX to the electron data, AP8-MIN and AP8-MAX to the proton data, and 1 year PROBA-V/EPT averaged smoothed spectrum to the helium data.

Demonstration products:

From the Heliospheric Weather Expert Service Centre:

  • Centre for mathematical Plasma-Astrophysics, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven provides:
    • Virtual Space Weather Modelling Centre: End-to-end (meaning from the Sun to the Earth) space weather modelling tool, enabling users to combine (couple) various space weather models in an integrated tool.
  • RAL Space, Science and Technology Facilities Council provides:
    • EUHFORIA (v 1.0.3): A 3D MHD heliosphere model that propagates near-Sun solar wind properties and transients related to CME events out into the heliosphere.

From the Ionospheric Weather Expert Service Centre:

  • Space and Earth Observation Centre, Finnish Meteorological Institute provides:
    • Volumetric reconstructions of ionospheric electron density above Fennoscandia and Svalbard displayed in 3D (TomoScand 3D) and by 2D slices (TomoScand2D).
  • Department of Ionosphere and Aeronomy, Institute of Atmospheric Physics CAS provides:
    • Detection of Medium Scale Travelling Ionospheric Disturbances (MSTID) activity in the ionosphere from the ionospheric Doppler sounder measurements over western Czechia. This is considered to be a good representative for the whole central Europe. MSTIDs create horizontal gradients in the ionosphere with potential impact on utilization of GNSS signals. The product is a table with the latest MSTID observations. Each table entry is highlighted in a color-coded manner to indicate potential effects to HF and GNSS communications. It is provided along with images of Doppler shift spectrograms, supporting the visualization of MSTIDs.

Please contact the SSCC Helpdesk (helpdesk.swe@esa.int) for any further information.