The Design of Value Added Services to Serve ESPAS Users

Abstract

The primary objective of ESPAS is to support the access to observations from the near‐Earth space environment. This is a region that extends from the Eart's atmosphere up to the inner magnetosphere. Observing instruments that are linked to ESPAS include ionosondes, incoherent scatter radars, magnetometers, GNSS receivers and a large number of space sensors and radars. The ESPAS platform supports the systematic exploration of multi‐point measurements from near‐Earth space through homogeneous access to diverse data, enhances researchers' capability to develop advanced models of the geospace, supports data assimilation and provides tools for validation of models. Although the system development is in its early phase, the consortium has already started to analyse indicative scientific problems, whose study will be possible through the use of ESPAS services. The scientific advances resulting from these studies will lead to the development of validated scientific models and consequently to reliable predictions and related products and value‐added services that will meet the needs of scientists, operators, decision makers, system developers, etc. An important work done within the ESPAS project is the definition of several scientific scenarios called "use cases". The "use cases" express the user requirements on the ESPAS system, in other words they express "what" the system should be able to perform. These scenarios are exploring the required behaviour of ESPAS and form a solid basis for testing the system's behaviour as it responds to a request that originates from outside of the system. The following main groups of use cases are under analysis and first results will be reported in the ESWW10: a) Homogenised access to the main ESPAS data repositories b) coincidences and conjunctions between groundspace and space‐space monitoring units c) tools to validate models d) on line implementation of models able to support space weather prediction services.