D6.6

From Soteria

Lead Beneficiary: ROB

Beneficiaries involved: ROB, CNRS, KULeuven and other institutes as lecturers/participants.

Due Date: Month 15 (Feb 2010)

Goal

A workshop consisting of typically two weeks of intensive training (lectures + hands on sessions) for young European scientists. The objectives are (1) to acquire easy access to knowledge, people and databases, and (2) to federate a community, since such workshops can create lasting bands. The workshop will focus on exploitation of the yet unused space weather data available in archives.

Progress so far

We found out that other organizations had similar plans as ours to organize a workshop/summerschool in the context of space weather in the coming years. We concluded that, in order to maximize international visibility and sharing of resources and expertise, it is better to join forces rather than to fish in the same pool of speakers and participants.

An opportunity appeared in particular to organize an International Advanced School on Space Weather Modeling and Applications together with the EC COST Action ES0803 and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (http://www.ictp.it). A proposal was submitted to ICTP which was retained for funding (TBC). This Advanced School will be a unique forum for students and young post-docs to learn from international experts in space weather. One of the two co-directors of the advanced school will be Giovanni Lapenta (SOTERIA PI). Many of the speakers will be SOTERIA leading scientists and a guarenteed number of the participants will originate from SOTERIA institutes.

We concluded therefore that the best value for money is obtained if we split the SOTERIA workshop in two events. The first event will be a participation/collaboration in the COST/ICTP advanced school that aims at a broad training in space weather concepts and applications. The second event will be a SOTERIA specific workshop, organised at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in early 2011. This second event will aim at a very targeted training in the tools and methods developed within SOTERIA.