Space Weather: a natural hazardGoing beyond academic discussions

May 15, 2024. The Earth is still in the violent aftermath of the Mother’s day storm. Operators doing an HF radio exercise between Belgium and Canada can’t get any signal through. What happened? Two types of solar storms raged on at the moment of the exercise and intercepted the radio waves in the ionised top layer of the Earth’s atmosphere. 

One of the missions of the STCE, the Belgian Space Weather Centre is to provide info on space weather and space weather impacts such that professionals with no space weather background understand. The STCE offers basic and tailored training courses and acts as a help desk for stakeholders that run space weather impacted operations and services.  The STCE focusses in first instance on awareness and secondly addresses the barriers that users encounter while dealing with the question what space weather is, as well as where to find and how to interpret space weather bulletins, alerts from the STCE.

We will elaborate on our client-tailored methodology. 

The STCE, the Solar-Terrestrial Centre of Excellence is the place for research, data & services and education about Sun-Space-Earth and their interactions. The institute can rely on a rich history and expertise in solar and terrestrial observations & measurements, both on ground and from space. The STCE incorporates a Space Weather Service Centre, issuing daily space weather bulletins and warnings in case of space storms. The STCE also runs a Space Weather Education Centre which builds on this firm academic and service experience and has qualified teachers and communicators.