Swarm Investigation of Space Weather and Natural Hazards Effects

Swarm Investigation of SpAce Weather and NAtural HazaRds Effects (Swarm-AWARE) is a new European Space Agency (ESA) project funded by the Earth Observation (EO) Science for Society programme. The main goal of the Swarm-AWARE project is to apply innovative techniques and deliver new scientific discoveries of the Earth system, pertinent to space weather (SWE) and natural hazards (NH) effects. Relevant achievements are expected through a systematic investigation of Swarm-derived indices related to magnetospheric substorm activity, field-aligned currents (FACs), magnetic storm activity, ultra-low frequency (ULF) plasma waves and equatorial Spread-F (ESF) events (plasma bubbles). Both the SWE and NH scientific targets have great societal impacts, since SWE effects can include damage and disruption to power distribution networks on the ground, while NH can result in a broad range of effects, from various perturbations of the ionosphere and related disruptions of, e.g., positioning (GPS, GNSS, Galileo) or telecommunication services (notably affected also by strong SWE events), up to most severe consequences, including the loss of human lives.

We tackle this great challenge through the use of state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) and advanced time series analysis (TSA) techniques. The Swarm-AWARE project exploits the unique capabilities of the Swarm mission data, including multi-point observations, together, significantly, with complementary ground data (e.g., SuperMAG magnetometer network and all-sky cameras). Furthermore, in addition to exploiting the unique nature of these combined data sets, Swarm-AWARE highlights potential new foci for future Swarm scientific studies. This research also investigates concepts for potentially new Swarm data products, which address the challenges associated with the impact of geological hazards (e.g., earthquakes, volcanic eruptions) at middle to low latitudes. In parallel, by providing longer time series of the Swarm-derived SFAC index, together with Swarm AE-like and Swarm SYM-H-like geomagnetic activity indices, that currently exist, Swarm-AWARE helps to shed new light on the North-South ionospheric asymmetry, in particular at high latitudes.