The European COST (Co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical 
Research) Actions: an important chance to cooperate and to grow for all the 
international ionospheric community 
 
Bruno Zolesi (1) and  Ljiljana R. Cander (2) 
(1) Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Rome, Italy 
(2) STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, OX11 0QX, UK 
 
The current COST (Co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical 
Research) Action 296 on Mitigation of Ionospheric Effects on Radio Systems, 
along with previous COST238 (Prediction and Retrospective Ionospheric Modelling 
over Europe), COST251 (Improved Quality of Service in Ionospheric 
Telecommunication Systems Planning and Operation) and COST271 (Effects of the 
Upper Atmosphere on Terrestrial and Earth-Space Communications ) Actions have 
addressed investigations of the different effects of the ionosphere on 
terrestrial telecommunication systems and on Earth-space systems. Throughout 
their lifetime of 20 years, COST actions have achieved a great deal in long-term 
archiving of synoptic soundings of the state of the ionosphere, in enhancing 
understanding of the morphology of the ionosphere and its dependence on space 
weather and in producing ionosphere-plasmaspher models as well as propagation 
models for terrestrial radio services available to variety of radio users. Bes 
 ides the formal contributions to ITU-R and the contributions to international 
organisations such as URSI, COSPAR, EGU and ESA, COST Actions have provided a 
forum for the establishment of collaborative European initiatives, a centre of 
expertise in ionosphere knowledge when none other equivalent in Europe or 
elsewhere exists. In this paper, we review the main achievements of the COST 
Actions as developed in the past studies and as presently in progress.