The A-EFFort team is pleased to announce that the first version of the Athens Effective Solar Flare Forecasting (“A-EFFort”) service has been integrated in the Space Weather (SWE) Portal of ESA’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Programme. The A-EFFort is a federated service based at the premises of the Research Center for Astronomy and Applied Mathematics (RCAAM) of the Academy of Athens in Athens, Greece, and is accessible via the SWE portal (swe.ssa.esa.int), under the “Solar Weather” Expert Service Centres webpage using a single-sign-on system which provides access to all SWE prototype services.

The A-EFFort project is a 12-month activity, to be concluded by the end of September, 2015. Thereafter, it will continue to operate continuously for at least three more years, until September 2018. The service is fully automated and provides 24-hour full-disk and active-region-specific predictive probabilities for M1, M5, X1, and X5 GOES-class flares, with a refresh time of three hours. The model currently relies on full-disk solar magnetograms acquired by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) onboard the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission and evaluates a flare-predictive parameter named “effective connected magnetic field strength” on automatically identified, eligible solar active regions. When flare probabilities exceed certain thresholds, relevant e-mail alerts can be triggered on demand.

The A-EFFort project has entered its demonstration and testing phase, soliciting comments and feedback by the community. Comments will be evaluated by the team and considered for implementation in the final version of the service by September 2015. Interested colleagues are kindly requested to register to the SSA-SWE portal services (Select “Register” at the bottom left of the SWE portal web page menu) and visit the A-EFFort project website. On the top menu of the A-EFFort web page there is a “Feedback Form” where they can answer questions on the quality of the service and its presentation, and where they can include detailed comments and suggestions. In addition, end users are encouraged to register for e-mail alerts for one or more flare classes of those examined by the service following the corresponding link.

Please keep in mind that the A-EFFort service is still preliminary. We therefore thank the community in advance for their patience and understanding. Please check regularly as significant changes may be implemented between now and the project’s completion.

For additional information on A-EFFort, please contact the Project Manager, Manolis K. Georgoulis (manolis.georgoulis@academyofathens.gr), Technical Manager, Kostas Tziotziou (kostas@space.noa.gr) or the ESA SSA Project Officers: Ralf Keil (ralf.keil@esa.int) and Alexi Glover (alexi.glover@esa.int).