International Scientific Coordination on Space Weather: A COSPAR Panel on Space Weather Perspective

The understanding and prediction of space-weather phenomena and their respective impact(s) on society have been widely-acknowledged as an international challenge and something that requires a global coordination and focus. In order to address this need to form more-formal worldwide collaboration and coordination, and to maximise return on such efforts (particularly scientifically), the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Panel on Space Weather (PSW) has created a network of International Space Weather Action Teams (ISWATs).

The COSPAR PSW ISWAT initiative is capitalising on established efforts by engaging existing national and international "teams" and "facilitates" to form individual ISWATs that are being grouped into clusters by domains/themes related to different aspects of solar/coronal, heliospheric, ionospheric/atmospheric, and planetary space-weather phenomena. The initiative also includes overarching themes such as dealing with large data sets and model/scientific validations. The ISWAT initiative places a strong encouragement for scientists to go beyond their funding borders to form ISWATs better suited to address challenges that one individual or small group/team may not be able to address alone.

The ISWAT initiative serves as a global hub for community coordinated topical focused collaborations and as a global community voice for the next generation of both scientific and strategic planning - this includes an update of the COSPAR/ILWS space weather scientific roadmap (to transform the roadmap into a living document) and to potentially provide an operational roadmap in parallel.

This presentation will re-introduce the ISWAT initiative, review its current status and plans for community-wide campaigns, highlight the overarching current plans for PSW, and place a focus on two key space-weather areas: the ambient heliosphere/background solar wind (designated as ISWAT theme H1) and CME structure, evolution and propagation through heliosphere (designated as ISWAT theme H2).