Quick Hits

• Monitoring – SWx requires continuous monitoring for quotidian and extreme conditions
• Refly sensors (hard to justify old sensor as new science experiment)
• Fly long missions (hard to justify even more of the same as discovery science)
• Users prize simplicity, portability, and robustness
• Not only miniaturized science sensors
• Less capable (targeted) sensors with smaller SWaP and easier integration, manufacture in the hundreds of units at per unit cost at/under $10k
• Put the D in R&D. Develop targeted miniaturized space weather sensors suitable for SmallSats and hosting in proliferated LEO
• Space Weather users need (improved) decision aids
• Traditional space science aims at knowledge gained and published in journal articles
• Space Weather aims to impact user decisions
• Space Weather SmallSats can demonstrate (and sustain) new info in decision aids

New model-data paradigm

• Modelers struggle to exploit SmallSat data
• Models should assimilate sensor outputs, not inverted physical quantities (e.g., flux or phase space density)
• Inversion at the sensor-level always adds assumptions, and sometimes is impractical
• Tropospheric and ionospheric data assimilation models can already do this
• Sensor providers must provide response function estimates
• See, e.g., PRBEM draft particle sensor response file format prbem.github.io/docs/
• Also provide background and error estimates
• This approach should enable rapid incorporation of new and limited-capability sensors

Publications vs User Value

• Need to address tension between peer review/publication incentive to develop most sophisticated possible model and user’s desire for simple, portable, robust models
• Need metrics other than publications. Witness Spence+ 2022, in Space Weather Journal, success of SmallSat missions was measured in publications because that is all we have.

© 2022 AGU, doi:10.1029/2021SW003031