International Council for Science - World Data Center System

Appendix A - ICSU Organizations and Programs

Solar-Terrestrial Energy Program

The SolarTerrestrial Energy Program (STEP) is the umbrella program of the ICSU Scientific Committee on Solar-Terrestrial Physics (SCOSTEP) during most of the 1990s. The STEP Steering Committee (Chairman G. Rostoker; International Coordinator J. G. Roederer) includes the heads of STEP Working Groups and Panels. The working groups span disciplinary interests concerned with solar energy and its effects in all the regions from the Sun to the Earth's surface and the human environment. The Informatics group maintains a Bulletin Board and is concerned with realtime information on alerts, data flow, project databases, and specialized data sets and models. The support panels are concerned with longterm databases, experimental techniques, and simulation and models. STEP newsletters started in 1990 and will continue till 1997. Magnetometer chain data are available on CDROM and through the National Geophysical Data Center WWW home pages:

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/stp.html

Many other geophysical and STP databases are available on neighboring pages, and may also be obtained on floppy disk or CDROM.

Vital support for STEP activities is provided by several of the WDCs and FAGS services. Of particular interest to solar-terrestrial scientists is the CEDAR database at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, Colorado. Information on data holdings and access may be obtained via:

http://www.hao.ucar.edu/public/research/tiso/cedar/cedar.html