Highlights

– an overview of the P2 and P4 sessions –

Evangelia Samara
NASA/GSFC

Space weather is a natural hazard that threatens critical technology assets globally.  Mitigating its impacts is an urgent need for social and economic well-being, and global security. Therefore, accelerating our knowledge of space weather is imperative, and hinges on building capacities of individuals, organizations, and society as a whole. As an emerging field, space weather is changing rapidly, and will therefore require new skills, abilities, and resources that must be sustained over time. As ESWW celebrates 20 years of “expanding horizons, from fundamental science to protecting society”, capacity building is a topic that is relevant to the international space weather community. Building capacity through training, research, and innovation can enrich the field of space weather. By attending the P4 plenary session, the audience will have the opportunity to listen to contributions about ongoing and new capacity building activities from the global space weather community (educators, institutions, and organizations).
You can get more insights of the talks in the P4 session on Friday morning (11.30 – 13.00; before lunch). 

Maria Graciela Molina et al., (talk on Friday, 08.11 at 11:45; contributed highlight text, here), highlight of the P4 plenary session, emphasizes on the technical challenges of applying AI techniques to space weather research and the steps that the community should undertake to tackle them. The authors underline that it is very often that students and researchers need to address complex scientific questions with technical skills that typically are not covered in standard coursework. To deal with this problem, the authors organized the first International Workshop on “Machine Learning for Space Weather: Fundamentals, Tools and Future Prospect” (https://indico.ictp.it/event/9840/) during November 2022. The goal of the workshop was threefold: “ […] understanding space weather and recognizing the main areas and gaps where to apply ML techniques, machine learning fundamentals, and hands-on sessions using tools and optimized libraries”. The authors believe that this kind of workshops are necessary and should be periodically available for students and scientists in order to help them foster the ML applications in space weather research.

Yang He and Chantale Damas (talk on Friday, 08.11 at 12:25; contributed highlight text, here), the current highlight of the P4 plenary session underlines the importance of the capacity building in space weather through a program with a broad range of learning experiences ​​for students and faculty members of the Queensborough Community College (QCC). The interested parties have the opportunity to “[…] apply theoretical knowledge to real-world problems related to space weather”, gaining exposure to cutting-edge research […]. One of the key goals of this program is to provide “ […] opportunities to students from underrepresented groups in science and engineering”. The diverse environment of “[…] QCC’s space weather group is an excellent model of how community colleges can offer high-impact educational experiences that bridge the gap between academia and professional space weather research”.

The P2 session offers a series of presentations on the Lunar Space Weather and its impact on the lunar surface, lunar environment and present and future exploration missions. One of the highlights of this session is Drew L. Turner who will talk about “Energetic particles and the radiation and charging environments at Earth’s Moon”. In the presentation scheduled on Wednesday, 06.11 at 11:31, D.L. Turner plans (based on the abstract) to give us an introduction on the magnetotail activity and its impact on the Moon, followed by a presentation on a couple of statistical studies on the characterization of the “[…] impacts of Earth’s magnetospheric activity on the lunar environment […]” . Based on the observations of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Cosmic Ray Telescope, Luisa Santos, the second highlight of the session, will present an analysis of the impact of the solar energetic particles on lunar missions. L. Santo’s talk with the title “Comparative Analysis of Lunar SEP Indices During May 2024 Solar Flares and Historical Data Since 2009 takes place on Wednesday, 06.11 at 11:45.