In this talk, I review the availability and use of ground-based observations for the study of the solar sources of space weather. High-cadence full-disk imaging in the H-alpha spectral line provides us with a valuable means to identify solar flares, erupting filaments which may be associated with Earth-directed coronal mass ejections and Moreton waves indicating shock waves propagating through the solar corona. We present the automatic real-time detection of solar flares and filaments, which was developed and implemented at the Kanzelhöhe Observatory H-alpha observing system (in the frame work of ESA’s SSA space weather segment, http:// http://swe.ssa.esa.int). Specific problems related to ground-based observations and the potential of observing networks for space weather research will be discussed