Come fly with us: services provided by the Space Weather Education Centre

Abstract

The Solar-Terrestrial Centre of Excellence brings together and supports sun-space-earth research and services present at the federal level in Belgium. In 2019, the STCE was a founding member of a European network, PECASUS, that provides space weather services for civil aviation. Our expertise in solar observations and research combined with the experience of our Global Navigation Satellite System and solar particle radiation group proved to be crucial. The STCE also strongly invests in education and training as these are a backbone of quality research and services, and therefore created the Space Weather Education Centre. This centre offers the Space Weather Introductory Course covering the Sun, solar storms, heliosphere, ionosphere, magnetosphere, instruments and methods to observe solar and space weather activity, as well as reading and interpreting our space weather bulletins. This course is taught to future space weather advisory staff, both military and civilian. It is based upon the STCE’s expertise gained through scientific research, involvement in space missions and space weather monitoring, and on its forecasting capabilities. The course is given by qualified staff. In addition to the Space Weather Introductory Course, the STCE has been and remains involved in a wide range of outreach activities, from public lectures, over dedicated classes and workshops at schools, organization of public events like open doors, publications in popular journals and on online media, scientific newsletters and press releases, to the participation in science festivals and the organization of events for the scientific community. In this paper, we present more details of our educational programme, reflect on the methodologies used, and provide an overview of the obtained results