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Abstract

Space weather is an up-to-date and interdisciplinary field of research. It describes physical processes in space mainly caused by the Sun’s radiation of energy. The manifestations of space weather are variations of the Earth’s magnetic field or changes of the neutral and ionized states of the thermosphere and the ionosphere.The main objectives of the Focus Area on Geodetic Space Weather Research (FA GSWR) are the development of (1) improved ionosphere models and (2) improved thermosphere models, (3) coupled processes between magnetosphere, ionosphere, plasmasphere and thermosphere and (4) understanding of space weather events and their monitoring.Objective (1) aims at high-precision and high-resolution (spatial and temporal) modelling of the electron density. This allows to compute a signal propagation delay, which will be used in many geodetic applications, in particular in positioning, navigation and timing. Concerning objective (2), satellite geodesy will obviously benefit when working on precise orbit determination, but there are further technical matters such as collision analysis or re-entry calculation. Objective (3) links the magnetosphere with the first two objectives by introducing physical laws and principles such as continuity, energy and momentum equations and solving partial differential equations. Finally, objective (4) connects the results of (1), (2) and (3) to the monitoring techniques and vice versa. To arrive at these objectives one Joint Study Group and three Joint Working Groups have been installed and are successfully running since 2019. In this presentation, we provide an overview about the status of the FA GSWR and provide future perspectives.