Summary of ‘Heliophysics in Europe and 1^st European Heliophysics Community meeting'

The meeting was held online from 19-21 November 2024.

Over 200 people registered and up to 100 people attended each session.

The meeting consisted of four sessions:

Session 3 Cross cutting Science from a multi-discipline perspective

Session 4a: How to join Helio forces to better couple/integrate ground and space based entities

Session 4b: How to join Helio forces to improve cooperation and interoperability between observations, simulations and tools to support more cross-disciplinary science

Further below, we have summarised the discussions.

Where availible, we have also provided a link to the talk material.

Please also refer to the session discussions in Zulip: https://euro-helio.zulipchat.com/

One main conclusion was that this meeting was to be repeated, most likely in Q1/Q2 2026 at ESA, ESTEC.

A summary of each session is provided below 

Session 1

The ESA HWG presented their actiities and the activities related to Heliophysics within each member's directorate.

The ESA HWG then presented how recommendations from last years' meeting were addressed.

ESA HWG will be looking to confirm continuation of their activities with ESA management.

A pending activity is to improve information availble on the ESA Heliophysics web page and that is an ongoing activity.

Related to the web page, a community database will soon be availible , to support inter-community communication. This will be widely advertised.

The presentation can be found above.

Session 2

This session highlighted the current understanding of EHC based on previous meetings such as EGU splinter and IMC IV workshop. It was also devoted to relevant discussions such as the relationships between the Heliophysics and the Space Weather, Research to Operation to Research (R2O2R), Early Career Scientist opportunities. A list of opportunities for ECR can be found here: List. These topics and comments (including those in zulip) will be an input for the upcoming ISSI EHC forum.  The session completed with announcing the next meetings: EGU session & town hall meeting and discussing on the further scheme of the EHC workshop.  

Refer to Zulip Channel and the summary presentation listed above in the Nov. 21 summary session.

Session 3

Session 3 takeaways:

• Need for enhanced synergy between instruments, missions, and disciplines.
• Advocacy for accessible databases to streamline research collaboration (emulating NASA's Heliophysics Data Portal, HDRL)
• Importance of cruise phase as an untapped opportunity for heliophysics. Suggestions to rename the cruise phase to "heliophysics science phase" to better reflect its potential contributions.
• Cross-disciplinary science requires better funding and institutional support.

Refer to Zulip Channel for more information. 

Session 4a

"Coordinating Ground to Space: Challenges, Successes, Ideas"

•Radio is underutilised: Despite its potential for space weather studies, radio is not widely used.

•Challenges:

•Difficulty convincing people to use radio.

•Combining space- and ground-based observations (e.g., LOFAR/MWA) requires extra processing efforts.

•Importance: Radio provides unique insights into Sun-Earth connections not available in other wavelengths.

•Expansion needed: Encourage other communities (e.g., those studying SEPs) to explore radio observations.

•Question for others: Why are some not using radio?

"Challenges (User's Perspective)"

Step 1: Finding/Reading Data
Key challenges in accessing radio observation data:

1.Instrument availability: Difficulty identifying data sources (e.g., CESRA website).

2.Quick-looks: Lack of easy previews for multiple radio bursts.

3.Observational setup: Missing details like time, resolution, imaging, etc.

4.Storage issues: Handling vast data sizes (e.g., LOFAR, SKA).

5.Proprietary data: Limited access due to varied time limits on data release.

6.Varying data formats & metadata:

•Different formats: .hdf5, .cdf, .spectra, etc.

•Inconsistent naming across data attributes.

Documentation: Either insufficient or hard to locate.

Some specific comments/questiosn came out :

• Do the heliospheric/space weather communities need (historical) event catalogs and which kind of phenomena?
• What information do you need from such catalogs? (date, time, intensity, location, correlation with other phenomena, etc.)

• Why don’t we have a ground-based, fully operational network observing the chromospheric/lower solar atmospheric magnetic field? The chromospheric magnetic field is crucial for understanding the sources of flares and CMEs. 
• How to improve the funding for ground-based lower solar atmospheric facilities? Funding of ground-based instrumentation is not a core focus of ESA. 
• Ground-based facilities are cheaper, easier to maintain, and free from telemetry issues when compared to space-based ones. Why, then, we still do not have such a network around the Globe to measure 7/24?

Questionnaire:

•There were 50 respondents to the questionnaire

•The majority of people were either space based instrument people (50%) or both space and ground (15%).  There were perhaps not as many magnetosphere – ionosphere ground instrument people

The overall trends and take home messages from feedback from the questionnaire generally fall into 4 main categories:

•Various Suggestions for Working Groups

A lot of the requests for information and suggestions on how to improve things are already existing but the information is not getting out there (e.g. webpages for how to access facilities / webpages of databases / webpages of code etc.).  People were positive to this meeting as a place to exchange information and there was a suggestion of setting up various WG to help with information about various facilities / datasets (how to access them etc.) 

•Organization, communication and information flow within the community - bottlenecks, duplication and contradictions of information from different sources, 

87% use google to find information about a new instrument online and 33% ask if someone knows some who knows something…..surely we can do better than google?

About 20% of respondents were struggling with the application procedure for ground based instruments or were unsure if they had access to the facilities.

Again, not having a central ‘official’ website to go to for information is proving confusing for people. 

•Funding support related to instrument operations but also database storage and maintenance

10 PIs answered the questionnaires and they were 70% ground based and 30% space based instruments. The funding sources were varied but the vast majority of them (~85%) have to apply for funding between every year and every 5 years.

Specific ground and space based collaborations were not a factor in their applications.  As a note, if this was part of an application then I am not sure if this would help things (no-one wants to have their funding being based having an instrument from another mission (outside their control) being in place.

Funding for datastorage and maintenance of databases came up a lot – since this often does not form part of pure research grants (make your data FAIR etc…but we won’t give you long term funding to store it and manage it).  If there was an EU data storage facility or a ‘recognized as key data parameters for EU research’ flag that people could tie to their research grants, this would maybe be helpful.  How you get a ‘flag’ would have to be up for discussion…

•Data Issues / sharing

93% of people get their data from online databases yet the vast majority of issues in regards to combining data from multiple sources are to do with data formats / not finding the data / not being able to work out if there are conjunctions.  There were the usual issues of ‘instruments not switch on or satellite in the wrong place’ which we are limited in how we can change that here.  We don’t need another database but we need people to publish metadata and there needs to be someway of obtaining European funding for database management / archiving facilities.  People should try to adhere to a well known dataformats but if they have historical data then there should be metadata (and if possible) example code provided to read the datafiles. 

Refer to Zulip Channel for more information

Session 4B

Discussion notes

(Panel discussion including Michaela Brchnelova, Jan Gieseler, Shane Maloney, Vincent Genot)

• Simulations: only the original modellers are able to convert outputs to physical units. Simulations need better metadata to make them more usable, and users need to know how to handle them.

• Knowledge: hard to find things when you don’t already know about them

• Open Documentation: we need better and openly developed documentation. In particular there is a lack of user guides and effort to make projects more user friendly. We need both training for ECRs and an incentive/reward mechanism.

  • Ways to improve citation of software and documentation. These often don’t count as scientific publications (JOSS etc, can be a way around this)

  • >Rosetta lessons learnt: provided money for these activities, but there was difficulty in getting recognition

  • There is not enough interaction between doc writers and scientists (users)

• Encourage promotion of and collaboration on existing packages. Increase visibility at conferences. Help people find the right people to talk to.

  • See various schools: ESWAN, PyHC, …

• AMDA experience: mainly developed by software engineers rather than researchers, who are more willing/equipped to write documentation. Done through national funding; Europlanet; Impex. This kind of project needs real IT to maintain it over years.

• Funding for software maintenance etc:

  • With contemporary software, there is a shift towards importance of maintenance

  • We are falling behind NASA (see e.g. ROSES)

  • ESA has programs to create new tools and exploit science data, but there is no program to maintain these (e.g. maintaining code or updating documentation)

  • ESA focuses on the spacecraft, and relies more on member states for this

  • European COST Action is a great solution to this.

    • A COST Action is an interdisciplinary research network that brings researchers and innovators together to investigate a topic of their choice for 4 years. COST Actions are typically made up of researchers from academia, SMEs, public institutions and other relevant organisations or interested parties.

    • Look closer at https://www.cost.eu/what-do-we-fund/ 

• Communication and vocabularies:

  • Need to push scientists and engineers and RSE closer together. There is difficulty to exchange because of different vocabularies

• E-SWAN and ESWW activities. EHC needs to identify involvement & overlap

  • https://eswan.eu/index.php/organs/esww-programme-committee/esww-format-survey

  • https://audience.ahaslides.com/OOS37

Refer the Zulip channel for more information and PLEASE use that to continue the discussion - UNTIL NEXT MEETING!!!!