Building a HOME for space weather modellers in the age of open science

What is it about?

When a solar eruption hurtles towards Earth, models can predict its arrival and the damage it will cause to power grids and satellites. Some of these models have been developed by teams of fifty scientists over a period of thirty years, involving a million lines of code and thousands of hours of supercomputing time per run. These models are not ordinary software. Yet open science policy treats them as if they were. A large international collaboration surveyed modelling teams worldwide and held workshops in 2024 and 2025 to determine effective practices. The conclusion was that policies designed for sharing observational data do not translate to models. Simply releasing source code is not enough; a user who downloads a model still needs training, input data, processing tools and access to supercomputers before they can achieve anything useful. The paper recommends targeted changes across four areas: access, validation, development and collaboration. It also launches HOME (Heliophysics Open Modelling Environment), a new initiative to coordinate the global community. The paper's central argument is straightforward yet significant: models are instruments for numerical experiments and should receive the same sustained institutional support as telescopes. If adopted, this framing would change what funders pay for and what scientists get credit for.

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Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The way in which space weather models are treated as data archives has quietly undermined open science in a field that protects satellites, power grids and astronauts. This paper identifies the issues and suggests practical solutions, including the creation of a new community platform where modelers can establish their own standards.

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