SOME 41 students from 14 African nations attended the training sessions--during which they heard lecturers from South Africa, Norway, Japan, France, the U.S.A. and Nigeria. The lectures and tutorials fell roughly into three broad categories.

The Skills segment was designed to impart to participating students methods and techniques for teaching and conducting research. The students were introduced to programme planning techniques, based on commercialized software called MATLAB.

They were also lectured in the principles and techniques for observing processes within Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, as well as statistical methods and strategies for popularizing astronomy and the space sciences.

Dr. A. Babatunde Rabiu, National Coordinator for the IHY African Regional School, says 36 out of the 41 students had not had any previous exposure to the programming techniques they were introduced to in the skills training sessions.

"What this means," he observed, "is that these individuals will return to their respective countries with a greatly enhanced capacity to teach and conduct research, especially in the space sciences".

The Space Sciences, at least in this context, consists of two broad categories of research, observational and instructional activity: These being Geospace and Heliospace.

According to Rabiu, a space physicist at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, a majority of those in attendance were more or less at home with the contents of the Geospace lectures--whose subject matter encompassed, for the most part, the physical and chemical processes of the Earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere.

Among the subjects covered in these sessions, were planetary atmospheres, satellite meteorology, dynamo processes, magnetosphere/ionosphere interaction, electric current systems in Earth's environment and ionospheric scintillations.

But for a majority of students, new ground was broken with lectures on Heliospace-a vast region that includes the whole of the solar system. "The overwhelming majority," he notes, "I'd say about 75 percent, had little or no previous exposure to the subject matter addressed under this heading".

The "heliosphere" is the region of space affected by the solar wind and the sun's magnetic field. It extends from the solar sphere, out into interstellar space and subsumes subjects such as solar eruptions, energetic particles, cosmic rays, the Sun's interior, the solar magnetic field and space weather.

Although the heliosphere is vast and hard for the uninitiated to envision, it harbours processes that impinge directly on terrestrial life. These include the solar wind, coronal mass ejections and flares. The cumulative impact of these heliospheric processes on our planet is referred to as space weather.

"Space weather," explains Professor P.N. Okeke, director of the sponsoring Centre For Basic Space Sciences at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, "is not a phenomenon that can be observed directly. There's no lightening or thunder, like the weather we know on Earth; and there are no clouds that the unaided eye can see".

Nevertheless, Okeke urges, space weather is real. Geomagnetic storms, for instance, can change the chemistry of the ionosphere and affect cell phone and radio reception.

Increases in the flow of charged particles in the solar wind and powerful eruptions on the Sun's surface can corrode oil pipelines, damage satellites and overload high tension wires (causing power black-outs).

Those who attended the IHY African Regional School, from various countries across the continent, are now much better equipped to understand and explain these phenomena.