Solar Terrestrial Energy Program

The worldwide community of solar-terrestrial scientists has embarked on an exciting and intellectually rewarding project - to understand quantitatively the linkage from the Sun through the interplanetary medium and into the depths of our surrounding geospace. The variety and complexity of the physical processes involved in these linkages have stood as a challenge to mankind's understanding for centuries. Through a concerted global effort, the Solar-Terrestrial Energy Program (STEP) has begun to use remarkable new observational tools and modelling capabilities to achieve an unprecedented comprehension of our solar-terrestrial system. STEP has been designed to study the flow of energy starting from the Sun, tracking that energy as it progressed through the interplanetary medium into the magnetosphere-ionosphere system and ultimately through the thermosphere and middle atmosphere to regions adjacent to the Earth's surface. This volume contains a selection of articles presented at the first major STEP Symposium on The Initial Results from the STEP Facilities and Theory Campaigns, and represents the state-of-the-art in the comprehension of solar-terrestrial environments.