A COSPAR/ILWS roadmap towards advanced space weather science to protect society's technological infrastructure

Abstract:

With the rapid development of the technological infrastructure upon which modern society depends comes a growing appreciation of the hazards presented by the phenomena around our home planet that we call space weather. The complexity of the coupled Sun-Earth system, the sparseness by which it can be covered by remote-sensing and in-situ instrumentation, and the costs of the required observational and computational infrastructure warrant an international approach with feasible, affordable solutions. COSPAR and the steering committee of the International Living With a Star program tasked a multi-disciplinary, international team with the development of a roadmap with the goal of demonstrably improving our observational capabilities for, scientific understanding of, and ability to forecast the various aspects of space weather. We summarize the roadmap, its top-priority recommendations to achieve its goals, and their underlying rationale. More information on the roadmap, including the team's full membership, can be found at http://www.lmsal.com/~schryver/COSPARrm.