Annual International Space Environment Service Meeting held at Space Weather Week

The International Space Environment Service (ISES) held its annual meeting in Broomfield, Colo., on 3 April 2005, just prior to the start of the Space Environment Center's Space Weather Week conference. The purpose of the ISES is to encourage and facilitate near-real-time international monitoring and prediction of the space environment by the rapid exchange of space environment information; the standardization of the methodology for space environment observations and data reduction; the uniform publication of observations and statistics in an accepted format; and the application of standardized space environment products and services to assist users in reducing the impact of space weather on activities of human interest. Meeting highlights involved discussion of current activities occurring in the Federations of Astronomical and Geophysical Data Analysis Services, the International Year of Planet Earth, the International Polar Year, the Electronic Geophysical Year, and the International Heliophysical Year. ISES has much of its heritage over the last 50 years rooted in activities supporting the International Geophysical Year from 1957, and intends to repeat that support for these incipient programs to occur in the next few years. Other discussions during the annual meeting revolved around a variety of important topics. For example, solar cycle 23 is now declining and many questions on the predicted magnitude of solar cycle 24 are coming in to the operational centers. ISES needs to work on its prediction for cycle 24. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a long-standing group that does many of the things for terrestrial weather that ISES does for space weather—Is there an opportunity to merge space weather and terrestrial weather in the WMO? The Earth Observing System (EOS) and the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS), each in their formulation stages, advertise better cooperation among member nations to share data and observations. ISES may have a strong contribution to make to each of these prominent programs. A special action, approved by a unanimous voice vote, established an ISES grant to provide travel support for forecasters visiting other ISES centers. This grant was named the “Gary Heckman Fellowship,” after a longtime, valued participant in ISES as a representative of the United States, who died in 2003. Other significant activities at the meeting were a demonstration of a software program allowing Internet-based communication worldwide among the forecasting centers. The experimental exchange software is called “Project Forum.” Other presentations included the draft 2006 World Days Calendar, a discussion of the potential to exchange white light coronagraph data from the NASA Stereo mission, and the move of the ISES Web site host from Boulder to Ottawa on 23 March 2005. David Boteler, the ISES director and a researcher from Natural Resources Canada, presided over the meeting. ISES members from the Regional Warning Centers of Canada, Poland, Australia, Belgium, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States were in attendance. Reports from the absent centers (China, Sweden, Czech Republic, and France) were received and entered into the minutes of the meeting (for membership locations, see Figure 1). In addition, the European Space Agency was also represented. The next annual meeting is scheduled to be held in conjunction with the International Council for Science's Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) 36th Scientific Assembly in Beijing in July 2006. More information on the ISES may be found at http://www.ises-spaceweather.org/index.html. Joseph Kunches is chief of the Forecast and Analysis Branch at the NOAA Space Environment Center, Boulder, Colorado.

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