Space Weather Enterprise Forum - The National Space Weather Program

THE NATIONAL SPACE WEATHER PROGRAM:

The National Space Weather Program (NSWP)
The National Space Weather Program is an interagency initiative to speed improvement of space weather services. It emerged in 1994 from the efforts of several U.S. government agencies to prepare the country to deal with technological vulnerabilities associated with the space environment. The overarching goal of the NSWP is to achieve an active, synergistic, interagency system to provide timely, accurate, and reliable space weather warnings, observations, specifications, and forecasts. The program builds on existing capabilities and establishes an aggressive, coordinated process to set national priorities, focus agency efforts, and leverage resources. It includes contributions from the user community, operational forecasters, researchers, modelers, and experts in instruments, communications, and data processing and analysis and is a partnership among academia, industry, and government. The vehicle to implement and manage the program is the National Space Weather Program Council (NSWPC), sponsored by the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorology, under guidance of the Federal Committee for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research (FCMSSR). Samuel P. Williamson, the Federal Coordinator for Meteorological Services and Support Research, chairs the National Space Weather Program Council.

The National Space Weather Program Council
Established in 1994 and sponsored by the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research (OFCM), the Council is a multi-agency group designed to provide oversight and direction to the integrated process of setting national priorities, focusing agency efforts, and leveraging resources. The Council ensures coordination and collaboration across the agencies involved in space weather activities. Council members include representatives of the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, Interior, State, and Transportation as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. We anticipate the Department of Homeland Security will join soon and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Office of Management and Budget serve as observers on the Council.

The Committee for Space Weather
The Committee for Space Weather is an interagency group aligned under the Program Council to advance the goals of the NSWP by facilitating working level relationships among the agencies, coordinating agency activities, fostering communication and coordination across all sectors of the space weather enterprise, tracking progress in meeting the NSWP goals, identifying and correcting problems, and recommending actions to the Council. The Committee membership consists of representatives of the same agencies who are Council members.

Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorology
The Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research, more briefly known as the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorology or OFCM, was established in 1964 as a result of Public Law 87-843 and direction from the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget). The federal meteorological coordinating infrastructure of interagency committees, councils, and working groups was established at the same time, under the sponsorship of the OFCM. The office’s mission is to ensure the effective use of federal meteorological resources by leading the systematic coordination of operational weather requirements, services, and supporting research among the 15 involved federal agencies and offices.

OFCM is led by Samuel P. Williamson, the Federal Coordinator for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research. For more information on OFCM, see http://www.ofcm.gov

NSWP MEMBER AGENCIES
AND
ROLES AND MISSIONS

Department of Commerce (DOC). Within DOC, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has the mission of describing and predicting the space environment. NOAA’s National Weather Service Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has a dedicated operational forecast center that serves as the national and world warning center for disturbances that can affect people and equipment working in the space environment. NOAA maintains unique space weather expertise to assist in the design of new systems and to reduce effects on existing systems. The agency also collects, provides, and archives space environment data from its polar-orbiting and geostationary satellites, from other agencies, and through international data exchange. Research and development is directed toward understanding processes and interactions as energy leaves the Sun, propagates through the interplanetary medium, and arrives at the Earth's atmosphere.

Department of Defense (DoD). The Air Force provides operational space weather support to warfighters, coalition partners, civilian partner agencies, and classified national-level users. This support includes remotely-sensed data from ground- and space-based platforms /systems, operational space weather model output, and mission-tailored products. Examples of tailored support include a variety of alerts and warnings for significant space weather phenomena that will affect DoD operations, the hourly analysis of the Earth’s geomagnetic field, and specification and forecasts of the ionosphere directly supporting high frequency (HF) radio and satellite communications. The Air Force Research Laboratory and the Naval Research Laboratory work with each other, a variety of other governmental agencies, and academia to develop operational space weather models, ground- and space-based sensors, and system impact applications.

Department of Energy (DOE). The core space weather program within DOE and its national laboratories supports research, applications, and operations in the detection of nuclear explosions from satellites. The program develops and supplies the Air Force and other agencies with instruments flown on the Global Positioning System spacecraft as well as geosynchronous platforms to measure local plasma and particle distributions and remote ionospheric electron content, all in near real time. Related efforts also provide the databases, assimilative models, and scientific support to the broader community, including research on possible impacts on electricity delivery and reliability.

Department of the Interior (DOI). The Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey’s Geomagnetism Program provides high-quality, ground-based magnetometer data continuously from 13 observatories distributed across the United States and its territories. The Program collects, transports, and can disseminate these data in near-real time, and it also has significant data-processing and data-management capacities. Working through the INTERMAGNET organization, and with other national geomagnetism programs, the USGS Geomagnetism Program assists in the coordinated, global-scale monitoring of the Earth’s magnetic field. The Geomagnetism Program also supports research on magnetic field activity, magnetic storms, and magnetic climatology, and it is currently developing a real-time storm-time disturbance (Dst) service.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Department of Homeland Security Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region VIII and the Denver Mobile Emergency Response Support (MERS) Detachment were designated as FEMA's Center of Excellence for space weather. The Denver MERS and Region VIII staff are coordinating with the space weather community to better understand space weather impacts on critical infrastructure, and are also coordinating with SWPC to ensure appropriate space weather alerts and warnings are received and redistributed to emergency responders across the Nation.

Department of State (DOS). The Office of Space and Advanced Technology (OES/SAT) ensures that U.S. space policies and multilateral science activities support U.S. foreign policy objectives and enhance U.S. space and technological competitiveness. OES/SAT has primary responsibility for U.S. representation to the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPOUS), where a wide range of space policy issues are discussed. The office also leads interagency coordination on all civil space-related international agreements implementing important NASA, NOAA, and USGS cooperation with other space agency partners, and plays a key role in the implementation of National Space Policy focused on dual-use space applications such as space-based positioning, navigation, and timing, satellite-based remote sensing and earth observation, and space weather monitoring.

Department of Transportation (DOT). The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has the responsibility to provide the operational requirements for space weather services in support of aviation and for coordination of these requirements with the International Civil Aviation organization. The increasing number of polar flights by commercial airliners, and the emerging commercial space transportation sector, has elevated the importance of space weather products and integration of the data into the National Airspace (NAS). As a result, the FAA is formulating space weather requirements for the NAS by 2013, and plans to integrate space weather data and products into the Next Generation Air Transportation System by 2016.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Heliophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate is tasked to fulfill the science strategy laid out by the National Research Council’s Decadal Survey. It advances our understanding of events and conditions in space; develops and uses new technologies; develops and maintains data that determine the nature of space weather conditions and provide insight into physical understanding; and generally observes and interprets the variable heliophysics system. The NASA Space Operations Mission Directorate (SOMD) is responsible for all human space operations in Low-Earth Orbit and beyond. SOMD provides the agency with all oversight for safe and effective operation of human exploration, including launch services, space transportation, and space communications in support of both human and robotic exploration. The NASA Office of the Chief Engineer is responsible for developing agency standards for environmental impacts on spacecraft systems and subsystems and addresses space weather issues across NASA.

National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF is responsible for maintaining the health of basic research in all areas of the atmospheric and geospace sciences. The Foundation supports theoretical, observational, and numerical modeling research with the goals of increasing fundamental understanding of space environment processes and improving space weather predictive capability. Research areas of emphasis are: (1) solar region evolution and eruptive events; (2) interplanetary transport; (3) magnetospheric physics and dynamics; (4) ionospheric physics and dynamics; and (5) upper atmospheric physics and dynamics. Knowledge of the processes that are fundamental to each of these areas is enhanced by a multi-disciplinary approach to investigating the basic mechanisms through which these areas interact.