US NSF/ATM Solar Facilities Assessment Gets Started

The National Science Foundation Atmospheric Division (ATM), in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research Earth Observing Laboratory (NCAR/EOL), is performing an inventory and assessment of all US facilities that are relevant to NSF/ATM sponsored researchers. This includes all solar assets: "facility-class" , space and ground-based, and occasionally-run experimental public and private facilities. The result of this effort will be a public document available to all researchers in solar and atmospheric physics. This document will assist the NSF/ATM's strategic planning process as it anticipates the future needs of these research communities. (see http://www.eol.ucar.edu/dir_off/FacAssess/)

The NSF/ATM and NCAR/EOL have established a solar measurements subcommittee (SMS) consisting of Jeff Kuhn, Hector Socas-Navarro (co-Chairs), K.S. Balasubramaniam, Doug Biesecker, Frank Hill, Terry Kucera, Bill Livingston, and Dave Turner to help achieve these goals. The SMS is charged with compiling such an inventory and formulating a summary report. This inventory and report is expected to be completed by June 30, 2007. The SMS seeks input from the solar (and relevant atmospheric) physics communities. A web-based survey aimed at assessing solar facilities and solar facility users will be announced soon. The SMS requests that researchers who have used solar facilities or data, or who have implemented instrumental and/or data archival capabilities, respond to the soon-to-be-available electronic questionnaire by January 15, 2007. A draft report is expected to be available in April 2007 and a community workshop to review the report will follow.

Questions, comments or concerns should be sent to the committee co-chairs (kuhn@ifa.hawaii.edu or Navarro@ucar.edu)

The National IHY Coordinator for Japan is Professor K. Yumoto, Space Environment Research Center (SERC) at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. This research center is leading Japan's most major contribution to IHY, namely the global deployment of MAGDAS (short for MAGnetic Data Acquistion System). When fully deployed, the network will consist of 50 state-of-the-art magnetometers providing geomagnetic data in realtime for the benefit of the international scientific community. All magnetometers were built to the same specification, providing a high degree of consistency in measurement for global observation. More information about SERC and MAGDAS can be found at www.serc.kyushu-u.ac.jp.

The deployment of MAGDAS is concentrated in two bands: (1) North and south of Japan along the 210 meridian, and (2) along the geomagnetic equator. In preparation for IHY next year, SERC has made a big effort to get several MAGDAS units installed on some of the equatorial points this summer. SERC is exceedingly pleased to announce today that the SERC team of Prof. Yumoto, Dr Kakinami, and George Maeda successfully installed the instrument in the following three African nations:

1. Ethiopia
Location: campus of Addis Ababa University
Contact person: Dr. Baylie Damtie (IHY National Coordinator in Ethiopia)

2. Nigeria
Location: campus of Ilorin University
First contact person: Dr Babatunde Rabiu (IHY National Coordinator in Nigeria)
Second contact person: Dr Adimula (acting head of physics department at the University of Ilorin)

3. Ivory Coast (Cote d'Ivoire)
Location: campus of the University of Cocody
Contact persons: Dr Vafi and Dr Obrou, both with the University of Cocody.

Dr. George Maeda - SERC (Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.)

- NATIONAL WORKSHOP

IHY Nigeria held her 2nd Annual National Workshop The Tai Solarin University of Education TASUED, Ijebu Ode, Ogun state, Nigeria, 19-21 July 2006. The Workshop was co-sponsored by International Secretariat of the IHY, TASUED, Space Science Popularisation in Nigeria (SPACESPiN) an NGO, National Association of Physics Students, Federal University of Technology, Akure Chapter, and the IHY Nigeria office. For complete workshop information, report, and presentations, please go to the IHY-Nigeria Home Page.

The International Secretariat of the IHY provided many educational posters, three-dimensional cards of Space Weather and SOHO, CDs of SOHO, Dynamic Sun and IHY golden pendants. These were distributed to the participants.

The Workshop was impressively attended by a total of 75 participants, students inclusive, in fields of relevance to programs to the IHY. Papers presented at the Workshop included ( presentations can be downloaded):

1.The Impact Of Space Weather On The Human Race, Communication And = Economy - Prof. T. W. Yoloye
2.Space Education:- an Overview - Prof. E. E. Balogun
3.Exposition on IHY - A. B. Rabiu & E. E. Balogun
4.Space Science, Atmospheric Physics and Development - Prof. E. O. Oladiran and M. O. Adeniyi
5.International Cooperation in Radio communication- Nigerian case study - Dr. M. O. Ajewole
6.Space Weather effects on Communication - Dr. V. U. Chukwuma
7.IHY, Education & Public Outreach - A Framework By Ayodele Faiyetole
8.IHY - Collaborative projects in Nigeria- Progress report - Dr. A. B. Rabiu
9.Effect of Air Pollution on the Socio-Economic Development in Nigeria - Abatan, A.A.
10.Spin-offs From Space Exploration - Ayodele Faiyetole
11.Estimation of Global Irradiation from Sunshine Duration at Iseyin, Nigeria. - Adepitan J.O., Falayi, E.O., Rabiu, A.B., Ayanda, J.D., and Oyebanjo, A.O.

- MAGDAS INSTALLATED IN NIGERIA

Prof. Kiyohumi YUMOTO, of the Space Environment Research Centre of the Kyushu University, Japan, and his team which comprised of Mr. Joji MAEDA and Dr. Yoshihiro KAKINAMI were in Nigeria 20 -27 August, 2006, to install Magnetic Data Acquisition System, MAGDAS, at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria.

- SCINDA IN CAPE VERDE AND NIGERIA, AFRICA

A workshop with a focus on SCINDA was held at Sal Island, Cape Verde, Africa, July 10-14, 2006. Cape Verde is a country made up of seven islands and situated of the western coast of Africa. A SCINDA facility was installed at the National Meteorological and Geophysical Institute, SAL, Cape Verde, with Jose Pimenta as the contact scientist. On August 29th 2006, a SCINDA unit was deployed to Nigeria and set up on at the Federal University of Technology, AKURE, Nigeria, being hosted by Dr. A. Babatunde Rabiu. Two more SCINDA units are still being expected in Nigeria to be hosted at Ibadan and Nsukka.

- ASTRONOMICAL TELESCOPES

The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan NAOJ. Has donated some telescopes to the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

- IHY PROJECTS UNDER NEGOTIATION

1.Atmospheric Weather Educational System for Observation and Modelling of Effects (AWESOME)
2.Scintillation Network Decision Aid (SCINDA) - 2 more units 3.Remote Equatorial Nighttime Observatory for Ionospheric Regions (RENOIR).
4.Ground-based magnetometer array science for IHY.
5.African Meridian B-field Education and Research (AMBER)
6.GPS in Africa

Dr. A. Babatunde Rabiu,
National Coordinator, International Heliophysical Year IHY Nigeria.
Department of Physics, Federal University of Technology, P. O. Box 3220, Akure, Nigeria.
Email: tunderabiu@yahoo.com

The 4th Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS) Meeting will be held in Bangkok, Thailand, 30 July - 3 August 2007. At the time of this meeting, IHY-2007 activities are expected to be in peak. It would be appropriate to propose a session at the AOGS to present the results of coordinated efforts of IHY in the Asia-Pacific and other regions, to highlight and report the scientific fruits of universal physical processes in the Sun-Earth and the entire heliosphere systems. Therefore, a special session on IHY at the ST Section of the AOGS should be proposed. I call upon IHY regional coordinators intersted in such a session to e-mail me your suggestions to mano@wm.ncra.tifr.res.in.

The information on the submission of special session proposals can be found at the AOGS web site: http://www.asiaoceania.org/aogs2007/sessioninstructions.htm

Thanking you in advance and with best wishes

P.K. Manoharan
Secretary ST (Sun and Heliosphere), AOGS-2007
Chairman, National Advisory Committee for IHY Program in India

You are welcome to visit the IHY Ireland webpages at http://www.ihy2007.ie

IHY Ireland will officially launch its activities to coincide with the winter solstice Sun illuminating the passage of the 5,000 year old Newgrange monument (http://www.mythicalireland.com/ancientsites/newgrange/).

For further details contact:

Peter Gallagher, PhD
www.SolarMonitor.org
School of Physics
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2
Ireland
email: peter.gallagher@tcd.ie

Since the 90's the COST Actions relating to ionospheric physics are particularly useful in creating a critical mass of researchers to increase the knowledge of the ionosphere and its effects on navigation and communication systems. Nowadays COST296 Action (2005-2009) (www.COST296.rl.ac.uk) provides a unique European forum for the progression of such matters. In the IHY frame the idea is to maintain the necessary European cooperation for a multi instrument monitoring of the middle-upper atmosphere and improving scientific joint efforts to investigate on the interconnection between low, mid and high latitude ionosphere. In this context COST296 has launched a set of scientific and educational/outreach initiatives described in the COST296/IHY web pages and summarized in a dedicated CIP, as follows:

The development and maintenance of COST296/IHY web site to exchange general information, expertise, know-how, links to the data archive and databases produced by this Action among the IHY community. Coordination of multi-instruments observation campaigns in synergy with the I*Y community to create a data archive useful to form a baseline collection against which later forecasting efforts may be compared. Stimulate joint investigations on interconnection between low, middle and high latitude ionosphere and plasmasphere during some big storm events. Contribute to outreach initiatives on the base of the experience achieved in the frame of national events and exhibitions supported by some Institutions participating in COST296/IHY. Organize public conferences to be hosted in the COST296/IHY participating Institutes and a competition open to the schools to prepare a calendar for 2007-2008 on the base of the best drawings selected by a jury. The calendar would be distributed to the participating schools with a prize to the winners. Under the indications given by Kirsti Kauristie and Ian McCrea (CIP coordinators, Ionized Atmospheres) and Richard Stamper (IHY Campaign Coordination Co-Chair), the COST296/IHY CIP is now part of the research topic "Radio wave propagation in the ionosphere - observations and models" inside the ICESTAR/IHY core project for IPY.

We are happy to announce that the COST296 community joins the IHY initiatives through the creation of the web pages on http://ionos.ingv.it/IHY/ihy_index.html (reachable also from the COST296 site) and through the submission of a CIP.

Dr. Lucilla Alfonsi, Giorgiana De Franceschi, and Silvia Pau (contact for the COST296/IHY initiatives)
Upper Atmosphere Physics
Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV)
Via di Vigna Murata, 605
00143 Rome (Italy)

The first meeting of the Network of Argentine Researchers on Heliospheric Sciences held at Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio -IAFE- (Buenos Aires, Argentina), September 25-29, 2006.

The First Meeting of RIARCHE (Spanish acronym which stands for Network of Argentine Researchers on Heliospheric Sciences) was held at the Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio (IAFE), in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The meeting was sponsored by the Argentinian Secretary for Science and Technology (SECyT), the National Commission on Space Affairs (CONAE) and IAFE. Latin American researchers, PhD students and post-doc students working on Heliospheric Sciences either abroad or in the country attended this meeting.

Two main activities took place throughout the meeting: (1) specific presentations to exchange recent results among all the participants, (2) in-depth lectures from senior scientists to the growing number of students working on this field in the region. The lectures were on the following subjects: Solar Radio Astrophysics (by Carlos Gimenez de Castro, from Univ. Presbiteriana Mackenzie, Brazil), Physical Processes in the Interplanetary Medium (by Daniel Berdichevsky, at GSFC, USA), and Planetary Magnetospheres (by Mario Acuna, GSFC, USA and Cesar Bertucci, Imperial College, UK).

About forty participants from different countries attended this activity at IAFE (http://www.iafe.uba.ar), which is an institution with a longstanding tradition in Solar and Heliospheric Sciences, with well established research groups working on these fields. For more info, please take a look at the RIARCHE web page: http://www.riarche.iafe.uba.ar

Dr. Cristina Mandrini
IHY-ARGENTINA
cristina.mandrini@gmail.com

To address the IHY's focus on providing unique opportunities for the global community to increase the visibility and accessibility of heliophysics outreach programs, the IHY has formed the IHY Schools Program to develop a series of schools in 2007 and 2008 with the purpose of educating students about Universal Processes and providing them with an opportunity to view their own research interests in a new context. The IHY Schools Program is organized and operated by the IHY Schools Committee (ISC), which currently consists of the following members: David Webb (ISC Coordinator), Ilia Roussev, Nat Gopalswamy (IHY European School Coordinator and IHY International Coordinator), Cristina Rabello-Soares (IHY EPO coordinator), Don Hassler (IHY North American School Coordinator), Cristina Mandrini ((IHY Latin American School Coordinator), Nancy Crooker and Barbara Thompson (IHY Director of Operations).

The ISC will initially invite and support students that are or will be associated with the two key elements of the IHY science program, the Coordinated Investigation Programs (CIPs) and the United Nations Basic Space Science Initiative (UNBSSI) IHY instrument program. Presently, four IHY schools are being planned for 2007-08. One will be in Boulder, CO to serve North America and is organized by Don Hassler and David Webb. The second will be held at the ICTP in Trieste, Italy for the European/African region and is led by Nat Gopalswamy. The third, for Latin America, may be held in Brazil and is being organized by Cristina Mandrini and Jean-Pierre Raulin. The last will be in the Asian Pacific region and the organizer and structure will be determined at the Asia-Pacific Regional Planning Meeting in Beijing in October 2006, hosted by IHY Asia-Pacific Regional Coordinator Chi Wang. Additional schools under the IHY umbrella are being considered in individual countries and the ISC will support these where possible.

The ISC is developing a general curriculum that will be used as a model for all the IHY schools. It will include seminars and hands-on sessions with databases acquired particularly through the CIP and UNBSSI programs, and collaborative efforts with other affiliated groups. The overall scope of the schools will be heliophysics, including Universal Processes, Sun-Earth interactions as well as those at other planets, and the outer heliosphere. The lectures and data labs will cover the cross-disciplinary studies of Universal Processes, responses to external drivers including lectures in the 5 main IHY science topic areas, achieving international scientific cooperation, preserving the history and legacy of the IGY on its 50th Anniversary, public outreach, and global studies with an emphasis on science in developing countries.

Other lectures may include topics by science disciplines, such as Solar Physics, Heliosphere and Cosmic Rays, Planetary Magnetospheres, Planetary Ionospheres, Thermospheres and Mesospheres, and Climate Studies, Heliobiology, Theory/modeling, new and future Space Instruments/Missions such as STEREO, Solar-B, SDO, and Ibex, and Solar Energetic Particles, CMEs and Space Weather, and Irradiance. The structure of the schools will consist of about 10 full day's class time, with brief morning and afternoon breaks and longer day and evening breaks for socializing and off time. There will be about 4 sessions per day with each session ~1.5 hr. The amount of time devoted to the data analysis labs will depend on the number of students and the amount of pertinent, analyzable data that will be available by the time of the school.

Additionally, each student will be given individual attention and encouraged to focus on their own individual research area. A mentoring system will be used, so that at several times throughout the school, they will be paired with 1-2 workshop coordinators/lecturers who will assist them in identifying the heliophysical regimes and research topics that will allow them to view their own research in a broader heliophysical context. The ISC is currently developing the schools? curriculum, and anyone with ideas or comments on the schools or the curriculum is encouraged to contact Dave Webb by email at david.webb@hanscom.af.mil.

GRAND CHALLENGE SCIENCE FOCUS: Explore the state of the sun-Earth system during extreme space weather. "Return to the Auroral Oval for the 50th Anniversary of the International Geophysical Year".

SPONSORS: CAWSES, IHY, eGY, ICESTAR, NASA/LWS, NSF, and the SEE organizers

WHAT'S NEW: The IMAGE spacecraft observed the development of a large- scale auroral spiral on the dawnside of the auroral oval and a long-duration finger-like structure on the duskside in the southern hemisphere during intense substorms in the main phase of severe magnetic storms on 15 May and 24 August 2005. The unusual features, reported here, are absent during substorms occurring at other phases of the storms, which do not show any dramatic activity in the dawn to noon sector. To our knowledge, neither of these structures has been previously reported as a feature of auroral substorms. Similar structures have now been found on the dawnside during substorms in the main phases of 4 other superstorms in 2003-2004 (29-30 Oct 2003, 20 Nov 2003, 07-08 Nov 2004 and 09-10 Nov 2004)

IMPLICATIONS: Since large-scale auroral emissions generally mirror the structure and movement of source regions in geospace, these unusual auroral structures may imply new features during extreme space weather conditions in: (1) the magnetospheric configuration, (2) solar wind- magnetosphere coupling, (3) storm-substorm coupling, and/or (4) stormtime energy dissipation mechanisms. They raise question about the aspects of the solar sources and heliospheric propagation capable of driving such extreme conditions, in particular aspects introduced by the interaction between active regions and coronal holes. They also motivate a search for associated features throughout geospace and in the ionosphere- atmosphere from pole to equator. Join us in a worldwide effort to combine observations and identify sun-to-Earth science focus areas.

SCHEDULE:

Nov 13-17, 2006, PART 1: International Data Exchange and Sun-to-Earth Science Issues.
JOINT SESSIONS WITH: CAWSES International Workshop on Space Weather Modeling (CSWM), Yokohama, Japan
Mid 2007, PART 2: Theory, Modeling and Simulations of Extreme Space Weather

WORKSHOP URL: http://workshops.jhuapl.edu/s1/index.html. Contains basic information on the events for the conference along with an incomplete list of associated Sun-Earth system science questions. Describes the features of the online conference. Please check back frequently for updates. REGISTRATION IS OPEN NOW

4 WAYS TO PARTICIPATE: (1) join a worldwide effort to construct the most complete picture possible of the sun-to-Earth system by submitting an online presentations of satellite or ground-based observations during the focus events, (2) contribute global data products, data sets, virtual observatory links, etc. for the information commons, (3) view presentations; contribute to online discussions about key sun-to-earth issues, and about possible modeling efforts; establish collaborations for follow-on theoretical and modeling studies; enhance graduate student access to international and interdisciplinary collaborations (4) help to test and improve features of online conference software to develop a new option for scientific communication as part of the International Heliophysical Year.

Nat Gopalswamy, Barbara Thompson and Joe Davila
Solar System Exploration and Heliophysics Division
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA

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