ISR personnel have worked for many years in close collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) on a program of research and heliospheric imager instrument development. Our goals are to understand the origins and interplanetary (IP) propagation of disturbances that affect the geosphere, to support data processing and analyses from the continuing AFRL Solar Mass Ejection Imager (SMEI) spacecraft mission, and to help develop next-generation heliospheric imagers. The research has utilized many spacecraft and ground-based observations of solar, IP and geomagnetic phenomena and recent and future observations from the SMEI, STEREO Heliospheric Imagers (HIs) and other imaging experiments.

A major portion of this work involves research using these data sets to address three scientific topics of current importance:

- The solar eruptive phenomena which lead to sporadic geomagnetic storms; 
- Shock waves and other IP signatures of solar ejecta; 
- The characteristics of IP disturbances which produce geomagnetic storms.

The most important goal of the studies is to utilize data sets related to solar ejecta and their IP manifestations to define the origins, geometry and propagation characteristics of geoeffective disturbances.  Boston College ISR personnel have been at the forefront of such studies and, therefore, have been instrumental in supporting the Department of Defense and particularly AFRL’s space weather programs.

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and their associated phenomena are the key drivers of major space weather at Earth and throughout the heliosphere. Major CMEs inject large amounts of mass and magnetic fields into the heliosphere and, when aimed Earthward, can cause major geomagnetic storms and drive IP shocks, a key source of solar energetic particles. CMEs exhibit variable speeds, intensities and trajectories.

Currently, predictions of their occurrence are poor and to forecast and mitigate their effects it is necessary to detect and track CMEs from near the Sun to Earth with a heliospheric imager/detector. Without such monitoring, forecasters are blind to CMEs for 85% of the Sun-Earth distance and, thus, unable to accurately predict the time of arrival and trajectory of a CME, or the intensity and duration of the consequent geomagnetic storm. 

SMEI has proven the principal that a heliospheric imager in Earth orbit can provide such early warning, ~1-3 days, of the arrival at Earth of CMEs, the driver of major storms. AFRL is now leading the effort to develop a next-generation heliospheric imager with the goal of providing an operational forecast system.

ISR personnel support and help analyze the data returned from the SMEI experiment, and are supporting the development at AFRL of the next-generation imager experiment with the goal of developing an operational forecasting system for the DoD.

ISR personnel continue to support various Space Weather development programs sponsored by the AFRL Space Weather Center of Excellence. These include the Space Weather Forecast Lab (SWFL), which is an AFRL project to collect, evaluate/test and help in transitioning data and models for use by the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) and other interested government agencies.

This includes a physical laboratory that has interactive computer data displays of space weather data from the Sun to the geosphere, a Model Assessment and Validation Project to review existing empirical and physics space weather models and the metrics required to validate the models, and the transitioning of data and models pertinent to forecasting from research to operations.

Point of Contact for this project is David F. Webb.