VALS is benefiting from the close collaborations established by the project team with Jacobs University Bremen (JUB) and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam. JUB collaborates with ISS/GPSM in the areas of multi-point data analysis techniques and auroral plasma physics. GFZ was the PI institution for the CHAMP mission (fore-runner of Swarm) and is Co-PI of the Swarm mission. Having a leading role in Earth magnetic field modeling, it provides its most recent geomagnetic field model to pre-process the VFM data.

JUB and ISS/GPSM are responsible for data validation by multi-point gradient estimation techniques in the framework of the validation proposal led by GFZ; their common results are communicated to GFZ on a regular basis. GFZ is integrating the contributions from all teams involved in cal/val activities and further reports the results to ESA.

The project relies on the in-situ measurements taken on-board the European Space Agency's Swarm mission. The full access to the Swarm experimental data and documentation has been granted begining with the mission comissioning phase.

The project implementation closely follows the project objectives:

O1, Building the necessary software tools: Nov. 2012 - Jul. 2013.

O2, Estimating the accepted level of fluctuations: Mar. 2013 - May 2014.

O3, Identification of data intervals suitable for the validation tasks: May 2013 - Jun. 2015.

O4, Performing the data validation and interpretation: Jun. 2013 - Aug. 2015.