New initiatives for synoptic observations

Several new synoptic facilities for long-term studies of the Sun will become operational within the next few years. This paper summarizes information on some of these projects, in particular GONG+, ISOON, GOES/SXI, and SOLIS. SOLIS, the Synoptic Optical Long-Term Investigations of the Sun, is currently being built by the National Solar Observatory and will become operational in 2001. It consists of a 50-cm vector spectromagnetograph, a 14-cm full-disk patrol, and an 8-mm sun-as-a-star spectrometer.