Impact of COST 271

Abstract

This article discusses the significance of the achievements of the COST 271 Action on science and technology for space weather and telecommunications in Europe and the world. The Action's work has impacted national and international projects and the decision processes. The key words encompassed in the title of COST 271 are «space weather». But as the reader of this Final Report will appreciate, many more topics were addressed during the Action by the large team of workers from a wide range of countries and organisations than this wording would suggest. Relevant to the performance of telecommunication systems that rely on the presence of the ionosphere for propagation support, or that are affected by transmission through it, there have been investigations among other items of solar and magnetosphere disturbances on the ionosphere, satellite and ground-based measurements of the ionosphere, assembly of near-real-time databases of ionosphere information on the Web, studies of planetary and gravity waves in the ionosphere, ionosphere modelling, mapping and forecasting, long-term changes, ray-path deviations in the presence of irregularities, channel-scattering functions, and scintillations on Earth-space paths. The impact of all this work on the outside communities can be considered within three broad headings as follows.