HELCATS - Heliospheric Cataloguing, Analysis and Techniques Service

Understanding the evolution of the solar wind is fundamental to advancing our knowledge of energy and mass transport in the Solar System, making it crucial to space weather and its prediction. The advent of truly wide-angle heliospheric imaging has revolutionised the study of both transient (CMEs) and background (IRs) solar wind plasma structures, by enabling their direct and continuous observation out to 1 AU and beyond. The EU-funded FP7 HELCATS project combines European expertise in heliospheric imaging, built up in particular through lead involvement in NASA's STEREO mission, with expertise in solar and coronal imaging as well as in-situ and radio measurements of solar wind phenomena, in a programme of work that will enable a much wider exploitation and understanding of heliospheric imaging observations. The HELCATS project endeavors to catalogue transient and background solar wind structures imaged by STEREO/HI throughout the duration of the mission. This catalogue will include estimates of their kinematic properties using a variety of established and more speculative approaches, which are to be evaluated through comparisons with solar source and in-situ measurements. The potential for driving numerical models from these kinematic properties is to be assessed, as is their complementarity to radio observations, specifically Type II bursts and interplanetary scintillation. This presentation provides an overview of the HELCATS project and its progress in first 18 months of operations.