Conveners: Carina ALDEN, Claudio CORTI, Krista HAMMOND
Description: The goal of this TDM is to present, to the European space weather community, the computer modelling roadmap produced by the ESA Space Weather Office . This strategic document, endorsed by international experts in the domain, will be used to plan the space weather modelling activities of ESA for the next years. This will be an opportunity for the community to provide feedback and to weight in the topics covered by the roadmap. The conveners will share the document before the ESWW so all the community will have the option to prepare their intervention in the TDM. Convener 1 will provide an introduction to the document with only a few slides. The conveners will then give the floor to two or three of the experts that endorsed the document to hear their opinions and to answer questions from the public. The conveners will provide context to the discussions. Additional live interaction is expected with the use of interactive smartphone apps gathering questions, suggestions, and keywords.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 2 - ESA Space Weather Modelling Roadmap</summary>Conveners: Maria Elena INNOCENTI,Jorge AMAYA, Stefaan POEDTS
Description: This TDM aims to connect forecasters with modelers, researchers, and end-users to begin bridging the gap of the O2R pipeline. There is a disconnect in communications between operational forecasters and researchers, especially those not already included in an R2O2R pipeline which has had a significant impact on model development and progress in the space weather forecasting field. What is interesting from a scientific point of view might not be relevant for a specific space weather impact/user need/use case. An open and transparent pipeline from scientific investigations to space weather impacts would make fund allocation more efficient for modelers, so they could focus resources/efforts on model capabilities most relevant to end-users needs. Some of the key questions to ask during this TDM include: What products/tools would make your life easier as a forecaster? What feedback from the forecasters to model developers would be most helpful to improve models/tools? What communication style and/or products are most helpful to end-users? By answering these questions and offering this platform, we aim to spark advancements in space weather forecasting and foster meaningful conversations that drive the future development of related products and tools. Target audience (max 100 words) The target audience includes operational space weather forecasters, the scientific community including modelers, software developers, researchers, PhD students, and end-users who rely on operations.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 3 - Space Weather in the Vision for the WMO Integrated Global Observing System in 2050</summary>Conveners: Jesse Andries, Kirsti Kauristie, Joaquim Costa, Mpho Tshisaphungo
Description: One of the key aspects of the mission of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), to facilitate worldwide cooperation on monitoring and predicting changes in weather, climate, water and other environmental conditions, is to promote globally coordinated observations and enable global exchange of observation data. The WMO framework for these activities is called the WMO Integrated Global Observing System (WIGOS), as it deals with all relevant observation data, including those for Space Weather services. An effort is currently undertaken to update the “Vision for the WMO Integrated Global Observing System in 2050” (see previous version at https://library.wmo.int/viewer/57028). The timeline works towards an approval through the WMO Infrastructure Commission in 2026 and Congress in 2027, with currently an ideal time window for the community to contribute to and help shape this Vision. This document intends to present a likely scenario of how user requirements for observational data may evolve over the next 25 years, and an ambitious, but technically and economically feasible vision for an integrated observing system that will meet them It includes both space- and surface-based instrumentation, involves public as well as private and commercial sector actors and addresses are relevant application areas, including Space Weather. A first draft of the updated document will be presented and feedback and input from the Space Weather community is requested. Apart from inputs on the technical content we also, and above all, welcome any suggestions that can help to make this document more useful for the Space Weather community. Questions and consideration of relevance to the Vision include: the expected evolution of requirements for Space Weather applications, technological evolution and innovation (such as H/W, Data, AI), observing systems plans and capabilities (surface and Space), expected evolution of public/private sectors in this field, evolution of the importance of Earth and Space Weather Observations to society. This is an opportunity to align WMO’s vision with that of the Space Weather community, to address any related concerns, and to assure that the document can be leveraged by the community.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 4 - Synergies of GNSS Ground Observations, Radio Occultation (RO), and GNSS-R to Improve Ionospheric Monitoring and Modeling in the Arctic</summary>Conveners: Sarah BEECK, Tibor DURGONICS
Description: The reliability of navigation and positioning services in the Arctic is increasingly critical for maritime operations, aviation, infrastructure development, and emergency response. These applications are all vulnerable to space weather disturbances, which primarily affect the ionosphere and, consequently, the performance of GNSS-based technologies. This Topical Discussion Meeting (TDM) aims to bring together researchers, industry stakeholders, and end users to explore the synergies between GNSS radio occultation (RO), GNSS reflectometry (GNSS-R), and ground-based GNSS observations. By integrating these complementary data sources, we aim to discuss how to enhance ionospheric monitoring and modeling capabilities in the Arctic region, where conventional observation networks are sparse and space weather effects can be severe.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 5 - Meeting Defence Needs: Tailoring Space Weather Services for Military Operations</summary>Conveners: Michaela BRCHNELOVA, Judith DE PATOUL, Steven DEWITTE, Lisa ROSENQVIST
Description: As military operations increasingly depend on GNSS, satellite communications, HF radio, and surveillance assets, understanding and mitigating the impact of space weather has become essential for operational readiness. Especially the arctic regions have now become interesting as a result of the opening of new shipping routes and the security question of Greenland, and these are the regions most susceptible to space weather effects. However, most space weather services today are designed with civil users in mind, and there is a growing gap between scientific outputs and actionable military needs. This panel forum will explore the specific requirements of the defense community, from NATO partners to national armed forces, for tailored space weather support. It will highlight existing practices (e.g., UK Met Office, USAF, JMG/STCE collaboration), identify operational needs in areas such as forecasting, system vulnerability assessment, and training, and discuss how to move from physical space environment monitoring to mission-relevant, impact-oriented products.
Key questions include:
- What are the most critical defense use cases affected by space weather?
- How can we translate forecasts into platform-specific operational risks?
- What infrastructure and standards are required to support autonomous, secure defense operations under space weather influence?
- What are the current gaps in space weather services as perceived by defence users? The session encourages active participation to clarify shared needs, foster civil-military cooperation, and help shape future space weather services that are operationally relevant to defense actors.
Conveners: Alexi GLOVER, Quentin VERSPIEREN, Sacha BRESSOLLETTE
Description: This TDM will focus on a lively discussion of current innovation models and their application to the Space Weather domain building on real case studies and lessons learned. The TDM builds on the outcomes of the panel event held during ESWW2024 titled “Towards Space Weather Operational Governance in Europe: Lessons Learned from Natural Hazard Management”. Among the key takeaways highlighted by the panel of experts was the importance of finding a middle ground between open and directed innovation and the clear need for boosting commercial dynamics. Building on these conclusions, this year ESA has launched several initiatives: an Innovation Journey, starting with an ESA Hack (Hackathon) offering a structured two-day programme to drive innovation and develop proof-of-concepts targeting the domain of space weather services for Spacecraft Operations; and an enabling study geared towards assessing market readiness and opportunities for commercial downstream services in other maturing domains. This TDM will discuss these initiatives along with other innovation models being successfully deployed in different sectors to accelerate the use of space data in downstream contexts. It will assess how such models may further contribute to the development of relevant, tailored space weather services along with service adoption by end-users. In this context, the Innovation Journey winning team will be invited to present their experience and their planned next steps. Discussions will then focus on assessing the value of such innovation-oriented initiatives and considering what role they may play in supporting development of the space weather service landscape in Europe.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 7 - Space weather at the Moon, from the Moon, and in the context of lunar exploration</summary>Conveners: Fabrice CIPRIANI, Iannis Dandouras, Yoshifumi FUTAANA
Description: This TDM complements the Mars - Moon Space Weather plenary session (Gina di Braccio et al), with a particular focus on the Lunar environment. The Moon’s surface offers a unique vantage point to characterize the solar wind, solar energetic particles, magnetospheric environments and interaction processes with airless bodies surfaces, and provides access to in situ resources. It is also a designated exploration target for ongoing and future institutional and private / commercial lunar missions, that will need to operate or survive during challenging Space Weather conditions. In this context we propose to organise a discussion around the following key questions, each of which will be introduced with an overview of the current status and a few examples to open the discussion :
- How to provide key space weather observations from the lunar surface and lunar orbit : status (intro slide + discussion), needs (examples + discussion) and way forward (ESA inputs on ongoing/planned activities + discussion) ?
- What can we learn from the May 2024 Solar storm as observed from the moon : what are the expected impacts for lunar exploration ?
- What are the synergies and coordination between different missions and space agencies and Earth-based observations to maximise safety in lunar exploration ?
- How can the space weather community and investigations support and help mitigate the risk for human activities at the lunar surface ?
Conveners: Alexi GLOVER, Alice MICHEL
Description: In the 12 years since its initial establishment, the ESA Space Weather Service Network has developed into a well-established platform enabling many aspects of R2O2R with associated processes in place to demonstrate and test new capabilities with service end users in the loop. The current Space Weather Service Network constitutes an important step towards European operational services, providing a coordinated framework for development, facilitating engagement between the European space weather expert community and end users, demonstrating capability and providing a clear path between early-stage concept and pre-operational implementation. This TDM will reflect on some of the key successes of the SWESNET project initiated in 2021, bringing together the SSCC and all five Expert Service Centres into a single project for the first time and underpinning a substantial development in service capabilities. With end user needs developing in areas such as arctic exploitation and cis-lunar safety along with funding for the next period of the Space Safety Programme set to be decided at the upcoming ESA Council at Ministerial level in November, discussion will then focus on high priority next steps and how the network will continue to build on the successes of the SWESNET project, strengthening the network’s R2O2R approach and improving user access to targeted information, whilst also preparing the community for evolution as new operational activities begin.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 9 - Impacts of climate change on ground-based measurements: Testimonies</summary>Conveners: Maxime GRANDIN, Aurélie MARCHAUDON, Véronique DELOUILLE
Description: There is growing evidence for climate change to have a significant impact on ground-based observations of space weather and space climate, especially in high-latitude regions. The list of impacts includes long-term atmospheric changes affecting radio wave propagation, more extreme weather events that can disrupt observations, thawing of the permafrost affecting the stability of observatories, changes in cloud cover hindering optical observations, and more. While some of these impacts have been documented, most remain largely unknown or are rarely mentioned. This TDM, which is organised by the E-SWAN Sustainability Working Group, aims at sharing some examples but also, and foremost, collecting testimonies from the audience. Our objective is to raise awareness of these impacts and pave the way for a document that could provide a global view of the numerous (and often unsuspected) consequences of climate change on scientific activities. The format will be that of a panel forum, targeting all users of infrastructure, especially in high-latitude regions.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 10 - Potential game-changing data streams to advance space weather forecasting</summary>Conveners: James Spann, James Favors, Melanie Heil
Description: Space Weather observations are the backbone of all space weather services and science. Currently many new missions are in development that will provide crucial additional data to improve space weather forecasting, such as ESA’s Vigil mission going to L5. In a community discussion we would like to discuss and get feedback on further improvements: What other key observation points should be targeted by upcoming missions to achieve clear advances in forecasting lead times or accuracies? What is the low latency data stream that we currently do not have, but if we did, would provide a substantial advancement for space weather forecasting? We will introduce a few new concepts under discussion and open the floor for community ideas and needs.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 11 - Global cooperation in ground-based ionospheric observation</summary>Conveners: Mamoru ISHII, Tobias VERHULST, Ivan GALKIN
Description: It is essential to have global cooperation in ground-based observation for space weather phenomena because no one can cover the observational area all over the world by oneself. Many organizations have been discussing the establishment of international cooperative relationships, data sharing, and standardization of formats. However, there have been few successful examples. GION, Global Ionosonde Observation/operation network has been established on January 2025 for promoting communications among ionosonde operators and data users. This action comes from the discussion in the International Space Weather Coordination Forum held on November 17, 2023 at WMO headquarter, Geneve. In TDM, the aim of GION will be introduced and have talks from some members but spend more time for discussion about what we can and what we should.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 12 - Data utilisation preparation of ESA's upcoming Aurora Mission</summary>Conveners: Stefan KRAFT, Mehdi SCOUBEAU
Description: As part of the Space Safety Programme, ESA’s Space Weather Office is preparing a small satellite mission for monitoring the Auroral Oval (AO) for operational space weather applications. This mission will be part of ESA’s Distributed Space Weather Sensors System (D3S), which has the purpose of monitoring the interaction of the Earth with the Sun and to assess and measure the actual conditions in the proximity of the Earth. Monitoring of the aurora is an important element of enhanced space weather nowcasting and forecasting capability since it enables the observation of the impact of the solar wind and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) on Earth’s magnetosphere and upper atmosphere. The impacts may trigger geomagnetic storms and sub-storms when hitting the Earth. Auroral emissions (optical, far-UV and X-ray) are a direct manifestation of physical processes occurring when the magnetosphere responds to the solar wind and CME plasma streams. It is planned to launch a demonstration mission in the time frame 2030/2031 that shall pave the way towards an operational system consisting of a constellation of 4 satellites that would be launched about 2-3 years later.
The topical discussion will focus on the following questions:
- Which potential new services and products can be established by using the observational data of the mission?
- Which possible enhancements of existing services can be envisaged? • Which developments would have to be carried out to enable future service and product provisions.
- What improvements in terms of the expected data quality or mission requirements are desirable for the identified services or product.
- Which observational capabilities are desirable in terms of monitoring specific features or events in different space weather conditions (e.g. substorm monitoring, global mapping capabilities, pointing strategy).
Conveners: Stefaan Poedts, George Miloshevich, Ekaterina Dineva, Panagiotis Gonidakis
Description: There is a growing demand in the space weather community for the analysis of large datasets, due to availability of data from space missions and numerical simulations. To keep pace, the community is using off-the-shelf algorithms, adapting models from computer science. These models offer valuable opportunities to improve space weather services, e.g. forecasting capabilities. Other important applications include automatic detection and segmentation of areas of interest, where machine learning algorithms provide greater flexibility and efficiency compared to traditional methods. Furthermore, such algorithms can be implemented in ground-based facilities and spacecraft for on-board automation and maximizing the retrieval of scientifically interesting data. Given the volume of publications of AI in space weather, the community should come up with better practices for standardization of data and methods to facilitate unbiased comparisons between the models. Importantly, transitioning AI from research prototypes to tools used by space weather centers requires trust, uncertainty quantification, validation and explainability. In this TDM, we raise the following questions: 1.) What are the fundamental challenges of producing trustworthy forecasting of space weather events using AI? 2.) What are the best practices for automatic detection and annotation of space weather events? 3.) Can AI not only detect events but also assess their importance and trigger high-resolution data capture for selective downlink.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 14 - Observations of transient events with the global neutron monitor network</summary>Conveners: Alexander Mishev, Agnieszka Gil
Description: Over several decades the global neutron monitor (NM) network provides continuous records of cosmic ray (CR) variations. NMs have been extensively used as the main global multi-instrument tool for the analysis of a specific class of strong solar particle events, namely ground level enhancements (GLEs) in which solar ions are accelerated to quasi and relativistic energies, leading to sudden increases of count rates of particle detectors at the surface of the Earth. GLEs are particularly strong SEP events with imminent space weather effects. In addition, NMs are used for the registration of Forbush decreases and recently observed anisotropic CR enhancements (ACREs). 2024 was a particularly interesting year with three GLEs, a notable Forbush decrease and ACRE reported. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the applications of the global NM network for space-weather purposes, including alerts for GLEs, aircrew dose assessment and monitoring services. The session is devoted to recent works related to all aspects of space weather, focusing on the application of NMs for study transients and the related space weather phenomena. Special focus will be given to recent advances of modeling of transients, nowcasting of aircrew dose exposure, specifically during GLEs. The applications of the global NM network measurements and outputs within satellite-born instruments, as well as, other ground based detectors, which provide complementary information to NM records and can be used to unfold open issues as e.g. spectra evolution during GLEs are relevant to this session.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 15 - Solar Energetic Particle Measurements and Model Validation at High Energies: Challenges and Advances</summary>Conveners: Phil Quinn, Athanasios Papaioannou, Rami Vainio
Description: High-energy solar energetic particle (SEP) events pose significant risks to space-borne and ground-based technologies and human spaceflight. Accurate detection and model validation of these events—particularly above ~100 MeV—remain complex tasks, hampered by instrumental limitations, event variability, background variations, and signal contamination. This topical discussion meeting will bring together researchers and stakeholders to discuss the current state of SEP model predictions at high energies, the cross-calibration of instruments, the standardization of event lists, and the integration of new data sources. The latter includes high-resolution satellite measurements and ground-level enhancement (GLE) observations. Emphasis will be placed on recent methodological advances, machine learning applications, and coordinated international efforts to improve consistency across datasets. The goal is to identify gaps, refine validation criteria, and enhance the reliability of high-energy SEP catalogs, paving the way for improved space weather forecasting. This TDM is co-convened by SPEARHEAD (GA No 101135044) and SOLER (GA No 101134999) Horizon Europe projects.
</details> <details> <summary>TDM 16 - Through Validation: Building Confidence in Space Weather Services for a Resilient Operational Future</summary>Conveners: Véronique DELOUILLE, Daria SHUKHOBODSKAIA, Sophie A. MURRAY, Suzy BINGHAM
Description: Space weather services are essential for sectors like satellite operations, GNSS, aviation, energy, and crewed spaceflight, where accurate forecasts help prevent costly disruptions. As their use grows, these services must be validated for real-world operations, transparent in their methods, and trusted by users. This session explores the full validation process, from research to operational deployment, emphasizing how end users benefit every step of the way. We will examine practical questions such as which frameworks and metrics best measure the quality and reliability of space weather services. We’ll look at ways to compare models and products across different operational centers and how to clearly communicate uncertainty and confidence to users. The session will cover key performance tools - like scoreboards, maturity indices, and Key Performance Indicators - that track forecast accuracy, latency, and false alarms. We will also focus on evaluating resilience during significant storm events and the role of user feedback in confirming a product’s effectiveness. By uniting researchers, operators, and end users, this session aims to show how thorough validation builds trust, supports informed decision-making, and drives the development of flexible, user-driven space weather capabilities.
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