Come fly with us: services provided by the Space Weather Education Centre

The Solar-Terrestrial Centre of Excellence brings together and supports sun-space-earth research and services present at the federal level in Belgium. In 2019, the STCE was a founding member of a European network, PECASUS, that provides space weather services for civil aviation. Our expertise in solar observations and research combined with the experience of our Global Navigation Satellite System and solar particle radiation group proved to be crucial. The STCE also strongly invests in education and training as these are a backbone of quality research and services, and therefore created the Space Weather Education Centre. This centre offers the Space Weather Introductory Course covering the Sun, solar storms, heliosphere, ionosphere, magnetosphere, instruments and methods to observe solar and space weather activity, as well as reading and interpreting our space weather bulletins. This course is taught to future space weather advisory staff, both military and civilian. It is based upon the STCE’s expertise gained through scientific research, involvement in space missions and space weather monitoring, and on its forecasting capabilities. The course is given by qualified staff. In addition to the Space Weather Introductory Course, the STCE has been and remains involved in a wide range of outreach activities, from public lectures, over dedicated classes and workshops at schools, organization of public events like open doors, publications in popular journals and on online media, scientific newsletters and press releases, to the participation in science festivals and the organization of events for the scientific community. In this paper, we present more details of our educational programme, reflect on the methodologies used, and provide an overview of the obtained result

The SWAP Filter: A Simple Azimuthally Varying Radial Filter for Wide-Field EUV Solar Images

We present the SWAP Filter: an azimuthally varying, radial normalizing filter specifically developed for EUV images of the solar corona, named for the Sun Watcher with Active Pixels and Image Processing (SWAP) instrument on the Project for On-Board Autonomy 2 spacecraft. We discuss the origins of our technique, its implementation and key user-configurable parameters, and highlight its effects on data via a series of examples. We discuss the filter's strengths in a data environment in which wide field-of-view observations that specifically target the low signal-to-noise middle corona are newly available and expected to grow in the coming years.Comment: Contact D. B. Seaton for animations referenced in figure caption

Exploitation, dissemination, education and outreach in the frame of the COST action ES0803 "developing space weather products and services in Europe"

COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is one of the longest-running European frameworks supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe. Its action ES0803 "Developing Space Weather Products and Services in Europe" involves the task "Exploitation, Dissemination, Education and Outreach". To meet the objectives of this task, we describe how we developed and maintained the Space Weather Portal, initiated the electronic Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate, took care of the scientific organization of the annual European Space Weather Week conference and of two schools for scientists and students from the space weather community. We also describe several dissemination projects supported by the action, which target the non-specialist in the field of space weather

Observing the Unobservable: Identification and Characterisation of Stealth Coronal Mass Ejections

In this doctoral thesis we study stealth CMEs: solar coronal mass ejections that are clearly observed in coronagraph data but do not show significant low-coronal or on-disk signatures of eruption. This lack of coronal signatures makes it challenging to determine their source region and predict their trajectory throughout interplanetary space. We identify 40 such events and investigate their properties both observationally and statistically. We find that our sample size is insufficient to determine the scaling law for the CME angular width reliably. We therefore analyze in general what the effect is of a limited sample size on the estimation of a power law parameter. Armed with this knowledge, we return to our sample of stealth CMEs, re-analyze the power law for their angular widths and compare the results to the power law found for normal CMEs.nrpages: 222status: publishe

The Effect of Limited Sample Sizes on the Accuracy of the Estimated Scaling Parameter for Power-Law-Distributed Solar Data

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Many natural processes exhibit a power-law behavior. The power-law exponent is linked to the underlying physical process, and therefore its precise value is of interest. With respect to the energy content of nanoflares, for example, a power-law exponent steeper than 2 is believed to be a necessary condition for solving the enigmatic coronal heating problem. Studying power-law distributions over several orders of magnitudes requires sufficient data and appropriate methodology. In this article we demonstrate the shortcomings of some popular methods in solar physics that are applied to data of typical sample sizes. We use synthetic data to study the effect of the sample size on the performance of different estimation methods. We show that vast amounts of data are needed to obtain a reliable result with graphical methods (where the power-law exponent is estimated by a linear fit on a log-transformed histogram of the data). We revisit published results on power laws for the angular width of solar coronal mass ejections and the radiative losses of nanoflares. We demonstrate the benefits of the maximum likelihood estimator and advocate its use.status: publishe

Solar signatures and eruption mechanism of the August 14, 2010 coronal mass ejection (CME)

© 2017 E. D'Huys et al., Published by EDP Sciences. On August 14, 2010 a wide-angled coronal mass ejection (CME) was observed. This solar eruption originated from a destabilized filament that connected two active regions and the unwinding of this filament gave the eruption an untwisting motion that drew the attention of many observers. In addition to the erupting filament and the associated CME, several other low-coronal signatures that typically indicate the occurrence of a solar eruption were associated with this event. However, contrary to what was expected, the fast CME (v > 900 km s-1) was accompanied by only a weak C4.4 flare. We investigate the various eruption signatures that were observed for this event and focus on the kinematic evolution of the filament in order to determine its eruption mechanism. Had this solar eruption occurred just a few days earlier, it could have been a significant event for space weather. The risk of underestimating the strength of this eruption based solely on the C4.4 flare illustrates the need to include all eruption signatures in event analyses in order to obtain a complete picture of a solar eruption and assess its possible space weather impact.status: publishe