Abstract
Abstract. This paper consists of a review of the important contributions of four COST (European Co-operation in Science and Technology) Actions in the period 1991–2009 to terrestrial ionospheric research, with applications in modern communication and navigation systems. Within this context, new ionospheric studies were initiated, leading to the development of a number of models, algorithms for prediction, forecasting, and real-time specification, as well as numerical programs. These were successfully implemented in different collaborative projects within EU instruments, promoting co-operation between scientists and researchers across Europe. A further outcome was to bring together more than a hundred researchers from around 40 scientific institutions, agencies, and academia in about 25 countries worldwide. They collaborated with enthusiasm in research, as briefly described in this paper, forming a lively ionospheric community and presenting a strong intellectual response to the rapidly growing contemporary challenge of space weather research.
Highlights
The Earth’s ionosphere is subject to great spatial and temporal variations
The enormous number of observations collected during the years around the International Geophysical Year (IGY), and in particular the new availability of computing devices, enabled the production of the first global maps of median monthly conditions of ionospheric characteristics, based on the maximum electron density of the ionospheric F region
At the beginning of the new century, members of the COST 271 and COST 296 Actions generated two more COST Actions: Action 724 (Developing the Basis for Monitoring, Modelling, and Predicting Space Weather), and Action ES0803 (Developing Space Weather Products and Services in Europe) under the domain of the Earth System Science and Environmental Management (ESSEM), extending the scientific objectives to what is currently defined as space weather
Summary
The Earth’s ionosphere is subject to great spatial and temporal variations. These include systematic changes in ionospheric characteristics and parameters according to the time of day, season, and solar epoch, and with significant spatial variations over hundreds of kilometres. This can be considered as a state-of-the-art summary for ionospheric COST Action achievements.
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