Working Meeting - Which Radio observations and instrumentation for Space Weather?

Christophe Marqué (Royal Observatory of Belgium); Karl-Ludwig Klein (Paris Observatory); Thierry Dudok de Wit (University of Orléans)
Monday 14th, 10:30-12:00, Ridderzaal

Solar radio emissions provide insight into eruptive processes occurring at the Sun (flares, coronal mass ejections, energetic particle acceleration), and are also precious proxies of solar variability on longer time scales. The observations are relevant for space weather for two reasons: on the one hand intense radio emission in the frequency bands of GNSS, cell phones or radar systems may be a direct space weather hazard. On the other hand, radio bursts can be used as proxies whose observation provides tools for space weather alerts, for instance for the arrival of solar energetic particle events and coronal mass ejections in the space environment of the Earth.

The solar radio community has developed so far a small number of facilities that provide imaging, spectrography or polarimetric measurements. For historical reasons, at best a limited coordination exists between current observatories in terms of instrumentation, frequency coverage or operating mode. There exist currently two international networks of solar radio instruments: the RSTN, run by the US Air Force, and e-Callisto, managed by ETH Zurich. Both provide important information on eruptive solar activity, but they give either no real time access to the data or have an uncoordinated or limited frequency range. The sustainability of these networks is not guaranteed. The need for better-coordinated solar radio observation is therefore important and even more needed as more and more civilian and military applications rely on a continuous monitoring of the solar radio spectrum.

We propose in this splinter to address the following points:
- review the relevance of solar radio observations for space weather
- discuss how new instruments and observing programmes could be designed and eventually set up in a network

We invite anyone who is interested in these questions either from a data provider or end-user point of view to attend this session. We aim at combining a few contributed presentations and open discussions focused on the aforementioned points.