EISCAT participates in two new consortia funded by the European Union through Framework Programme 7. The projects ESPAS, serving space weather and Sun-climate studies, and ENVRI, a e-infrastructure related project for the environmental ESFRI projects, recently had their kick-off meetings at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Rome, Italy, on 10-11 November and 23-25 November 2011, respectively.

The ESPAS project, serving space weather and Sun-climate studies, will provide the e-infrastructure necessary to support the access to observations, modelling and prediction of the near-Earth space environment. This includes the plasma and energetic particle environments as well as the neutral atmosphere at altitudes above 60 km. The primary goal of ESPAS is to facilitate user access to heterogeneous data from multiple providers, ranging from ground-based observations acquired with multiple instruments and techniques, to data from satellite experiments, using a mixture of in-situ and remotely sensed techniques.

ENVRI is a cluster project for the benefit of environmental Research Infrastructures, which are listed on the current ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) Roadmap: EMSO, EURO-ARGO, ICOS. LIFEWATCH. EISCAT_3D, EPOS, and SIOS. The central goal of the ENVRI project is to implement harmonised solutions and generate guidelines for the common needs of all the environmental ESFRI projects, with a special focus on such issues as architectures, metadata frameworks, data discovery in scattered repositories, visualisation and data curation.