The Centre for Earth and Space Research of the University of Coimbra (CITEUC) is a Research Unit dedicated to fundamental and applied research in Earth and Space Sciences, including their teaching sciences, history, applications, and dissemination. We are a group of about 40 researchers including 10 PhD students. We work in a wide range of Earth and Space Sciences. CITEUC has two research groups: i) Earth Dynamics, focusing on Earth's inner structure and processes therein, crustal evolution, and Earth's history ii) Solar System Sciences, focusing on solar physics, celestial mechanics, minor bodies of the solar system, and planetary geology. We highlight that we are developing, at CITEUC, areas with dim representation in the Portuguese science, so far, as the Space Weather and the Light Pollution, but with impact on the society. Our resercah projects are involved in international collaborations in the five continents and with transnational organisations such as European Space Agency, UNESCO, and European Southern Observatory . We have been also strongly involved in the post-graduation supervising. Most of our members have been involved in Education and Public Outreach activities participating, during the last 5 yrs, in actions for more 15000 participants. CITEUC is housed at the Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory which lead to a unique combination of continuously, acquired data requiring intensive laboratory work, to verify and certify all data integrated into national and international publicly accessible databases.
Our central goal is the study of Earth and Solar System Sciences, but not only as pure research. We aim to serve even more the community by pointing out the potential natural threats, coming from inside the Earth and outside of it. We continue to propose to look upon the Earth as an integrated complex system interconnecting the information on what affects us either having a inner and/or outer origin. In this context, on the shoulders of our fundamental and applied research, we have made a global strategic structuring creating the "Space- Planetary Interactions Monitoring and Forecasting Laboratory" to characterise/quantify solar activity parameters, and their temporal evolution, and to integrate them with the analysis and recognition of patterns in magnetograms, in order to create Space Weather alerts. On the other hand, taking advantage of CITEUC's expertise in geosciences, OGAUC's data series, and our team members responsible for the "Natural Radioactivity Laboratory", we are developing another strategic transversal theme centred in Natural and Anthropic Hazards and Risks, and their analysis. In short, in order to achieve this transfer of knowledge in a way to be useful to society we are implementing three transversal themes, combining the two groups, namely, Space Weather Natural and Anthropic Hazards and Risks and History and Education and Dissemination/Popularisation of Sciences.
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