How We Work

International Space Weather Action Teams (ISWAT) are a community-coordinated initiative that is facilitated by a group of ISWAT Moderators. Moderators are invited by COSPAR Panel on Space Weather Chairs/Vice-Chairs and the ISWAT Coordinator.

Success and drive of the ISWAT initiative depend on the active participation of the community. Action Teams can be registered by any research team to coordinate and structure their joint work on the specific Space Weather topics (see Clusters). Each Action Team consists of a lead and active participants.

Action Teams are grouped into ISWAT Clusters, by domain, phenomena, impact, or overarching activities. The three regimes, Sun - Heliosphere - Geospace, cover the entire chain of action of Space Weather. The overarching activities include, assessment, information architecture, data utilization, and education/outreach.

To encourage active participation and emergence of new leads we observe a time limit for "no-activity" at all levels. People interested in the activities, but not as an active member, can be registered as followers.


ISWAT Cluster moderators/co-moderators:

Moderators are requested to reconfirm their commitment to COSPAR/PSW on a yearly basis. The ISWAT moderator appointment procedure will be revisited in 2022.

Responsibility of moderators is to:

  • facilitate the emergence of new Teams and leads.
  • invite existing international teams into ISWAT to build upon established efforts.
  • update Cluster Web pages.
  • review and approve new Teams registrations.
  • facilitate activities of Action Teams in a Cluster in coordination with Team leads.
  • interface with other Clusters, facilitate cross-Cluster projects.
  • encourage Action Teams to lead and organize community-wide campaigns, special sessions, topical discussions and working meetings relevant to Cluster objectives.
  • participate in ISWAT business meetings.
  • contribute to strategic and near-term planning of ISWAT activities.
  • collect inputs from Action Team leads and contribute to space weather roadmap updates.  

Action Team leads/co-leads:

Team leaders are not appointed, they emerge from the community. 

Responsibility of Action Team lead is to:

  • register the team.
  • choose the team's work focus on specific topics relevant to ISWAT Cluster objectives (link to existing topics OR introduce/propose new topics).
  • organize the team’s work and ensure that it is focused on its primary goal.
  • update and maintain the team webpage (progress/goals achieved).
  • invite and accept additional active participants.
  • communicate with Cluster moderator(s).
  • lead and organize in coordination with Cluster moderator and other Team leads community-wide campaigns, special sessions, topical discussions and working meetings relevant to their work.

ISWAT activities:

We will use our joint forces to

  • advance understanding of space weather processes linked to major impacts, and
  • feed validated improvements in understanding, modeling and forecasting into the research-to-operation (R2O) transition process.
  • ISWAT can address different aspects of space weather capabilities, e.g.,
    • advancing understanding and modeling,
    • defining essential space environment quantities (ESEQ) and criteria for impacts,
    • improving specifications and forecasting,
    • assessment of specification and forecasting capabilities,
    • enabling organized access to research products (data, models, applications, etc), (meta)data standardization,
    • optimized utilization of available observations/measurements,
    • inputs for future mission planning, deployment of new instrumentation, 
    • generating inputs to our Roadmap updates.

Active participant status:

  • The ISWAT initiative is open to all motivated research groups and individuals committed to active participation.
  • Requirements for active participation are defined (and verified) by Team leads and Cluster moderators.
  • There will be a time limit for “no-activity” of Team members and Action Teams, after which they become followers.

Follower status:

  • Inactive participants, or temporary dropped-out active participants (after an agreed time period of "no-activity"), can be on the ISWAT E-Mail distribution list, in order to receive information on upcoming events and requests for inputs.