LOFAR4SpaceWeather (LOFAR4SW) – Increasing European Space-Weather Capability with Europe's Largest Radio Telescope: Summary and Beyond the First Major Project

The LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) is a pan-European radio-telescope system consisting of multiple sites across Europe. It consists of a dense core of 24 stations near Exloo in The Netherlands, an additional 14 stations spread across the northeast Netherlands, and a further 14 international stations: six across Germany, three in northern Poland, and one each in France, Ireland, Latvia, Sweden, and the UK. Further sites are already being planned across Europe to include Italy and Bulgaria in the coming years.

Space-Weather operations, monitoring, and the unpinning research are very-important topics in the worldwide space-weather scene. Knowledge and understanding of interactions in the Sun-Earth system, the physics behind observed space-weather phenomena, and the direct impact on modern technologies are key areas of scientific and technological interest.

The LOFAR For Space Weather (LOFAR4SW) project (see: http://lofar4sw.eu/) was a Horizon 2020 (H2020) INFRADEV design study to undertake the first investigations and initial upgrade path for the upgrading of LOFAR across Europe. The project undertook wide-ranging studies into how the LOFAR telescope could become fully space-weather capable. This including the writing of extensive documentation as final design documents of LOFAR4SW providing the building blocks of a comprehensive conceptual and technical description of the necessary upgrades needed to enable simultaneous operation as a radio telescope for astronomical research as well as an infrastructure working for space-weather monitoring/studies. In this work we present a brief overview of the LOFAR4SW project, some examples of the envisaged capabilities, and a summary of the end of the project and where we the next steps are being taken.

The fully-envisaged longer-term goal of enabling a LOFAR4SW update across the LOFAR system would make LOFAR/LOFAR4SW one of the world's most-comprehensive space-weather observing systems capable of shedding new light on several aspects of the space-weather system, from the Sun to the solar wind to Jupiter and Earth's ionosphere.