# Summary of the plenary sessions at European Space Weather Week 15: space weather users and service providers working together now and in the future

## TL;DR

This paper summarizes plenary sessions at European Space Weather Week 15, highlighting the collaboration between space weather users and service providers, current challenges, and future needs for operational forecasting improvements.

## Contribution

It provides an overview of international efforts, user and provider perspectives, and identifies key areas for research and development in operational space weather forecasting.

## Key findings

- Timely and reliable space weather information is achievable during severe events.
- User impacts vary across sectors despite similar space weather severity.
- More research and funding are needed for service development and user-specific forecasting.

## Abstract

During European Space Weather Week 15 two plenary sessions were held to review the status of operational space weather forecasting. The first session addressed the topic of working with space weather service providers now and in the future, the user perspective. The second session provided the service perspective, addressing experiences in forecasting development and operations. Presentations in both sessions provided an overview of international efforts on these topics, and panel discussion topics arising in the first session were used as a basis for panel discussion in the second session. Discussion topics included experiences during the September 2017 space weather events, cross domain impacts, timeliness of notifications, and provision of effective user education. Users highlighted that a 'severe' space weather event did not necessarily lead to severe impacts for each individual user across the different sectors. Service providers were generally confident that timely and reliable information could be provided during severe and extreme events, although stressed that more research and funding were required in this relatively new field of operational space weather forecasting, to ensure continuation of capabilities and further development of services, in particular improved forecasting targeting user needs. Here a summary of the sessions is provided followed by a commentary on the current state-of-the-art and potential next steps towards improvement of services.