2011 Workshop Summary
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The 26th CEDAR (Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions) Workshop was held jointly with Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) in 2011 at the Santa Fe Convention Center and Eldorado Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico from Sunday June 26 through Friday July 01. The last joint meeting was held in 2005, also in Santa Fe. This time the two scientific programs were strongly integrated through the activities of a CEDAR-GEM Taskforce chaired by J. Michael Ruohoniemi of Virginia Tech, the CEDAR-GEM Liaison on both steering committees. Joint activities were the Student Workshop, 18 joint workshops, joint plenary sessions, joint poster sessions, and the joint banquet. Hotel bookings at the Eldorado, La Fonda, and Hilton and meeting space at the Eldorado and the new Santa Fe Convention Center were distributed uniformly between the CEDAR and GEM groups which facilitated close interaction.
A total of 564 came to the joint CEDAR-GEM Workshop, 313 from CEDAR (133 students, 128 supported plus 11 supported CEDAR Postdocs and others) and 251 from GEM (81 students, 65 supported) with a total of 214 students and 350 non-students. The CEDAR participants came from 78 institutions, 15 outside the United States and Puerto Rico. There were 56 universities, 15 laboratories, and 7 small businesses. Of the 133 CEDAR students, 28 were undergraduate students, with 25 students coming from 10 foreign universities. A total of 77, including 70 students (about half), were first-time workshop participants.
The Student Workshop on Sunday on Magnetosphere-Ionosphere (MI) Coupling was run jointly by the CEDAR and GEM student representatives, and was only open to students as participants and speakers. The CEDAR student representatives this year were second year representative Elizabeth Bass of Boston University and first year representative Roger Varney of Cornell, who was the primary CEDAR person for the Student Workshop. Their GEM counterparts were Brian Walsh of Boston University and Jenni Kissinger of the University of California at Los Angeles. The new CEDAR student representative joining Roger Varney is Katelynn Greer of the University of Colorado.
Instead of an Ice-Breaker Sunday night, the joint community held a plated banquet on Monday night at the Santa Fe Convention Center, with Michael Mendillo speaking after the banquet on 'A Remembrance of Sendai, Japan, March 2011'. Michael was the only American at the Sendai airport at the time of the earthquake and following tsunami which resulted in a huge loss of life and property in Japan. He wrote up his experiences in a booklet for a fund-raiser via the American Red Cross and Amazon.com.
The joint CEDAR-GEM community met together in plenary session on Monday morning to hear about the past decade of accomplishments in Atmosphere-Ionosphere-Magnetosphere Interactions (AIMI) Research from Jeffrey Forbes of the University of Colorado, and in Solar-Wind-Magnetosphere Interactions (SWMI) from Mike Liemohn, the GEM chairman, who reported for Michelle Thomsen of the Los Alamos National Laboraties (LANL). Many participants from LANL were not able to attend on Monday because of a general evacuation order for those living in Los Alamos due to a wildfire that started on Sunday. We also heard opposing CEDAR (Ionosphere-Thermosphere or IT) and GEM (Magnetosphere or MAG) viewpoints on active research in 'Outflow and Mass Flow' from Bob Schunk of Utah State University and Bill Lotko of Dartmouth College, and on 'Inner Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling' from Pontus Brandt of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the John Hopkins University and Mark Moldwin of the University of Michigan.
Wednesday, both groups met for a series on System Science with talks given by Dave Hysell of Cornell, Tom Immel of the University of California at Berkeley, and Mike Liemohn of the University of Michigan. Thursday was the Joint Tutorial chosen by the students and given by Anthea Coster of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on "Using GPS to Study Magnetospheric-Ionospheric Coupling". Tuesday and Friday were days for separate plenary sessions.
The 22cnd CEDAR Prize Lecture was given in the Tuesday CEDAR plenary session by Joseph Huba of the Naval Research Laboratory on “Modeling Global Ionospheric Phenomena”. Callum Anderson of the University of Alaska gave the sole science highlight on "Exploring Local-Scale Flow Structures in Thermospheric Winds using a Bistatic Array of All-sky Imaging Fabry-Perot Spectrometers", and Brentha Thurairajah of Virginia Tech gave her final CEDAR Post-doc report on "Study of Polar Mesospheric Cloud Structures and the Environment in Which They Form".
The Monday IT-MAG series was video-taped, as was the System Science series, the student-chosen tutorial, and the CEDAR Prize and science highlight. A final video-taped event was the "Student Tutorial/Workshop on Data Assimilation", one of 15 joint individual workshops. Speakers for that workshop were Ludger Scherliess of Utah State University, Tomoko Matsuo of the University of Colorado contracters at NOAA, Humberto Godinez of LANL speaking for Josef Koller, and Gary Bust of Atmospheric & Space Technology Research Associates. There are six hours on three separate DVDs as well as on-line, this is the second year for mp4 files. Brian Day of Daylight Productions and Rentals (brian@daylightav.com) is the contact for the $70 set of three DVDs.
The video talks and others are available in .pdf form from the agenda or from individual workshop pages. Apart from the Sunday Student Workshop, there were 15 joint workshops in 24 2-h time slots, 12 CEDAR workshops in 15 time slots, and 10 GEM workshops in 30 time slots. CEDAR and joint workshop conveners and speakers are encouraged to add their talks to the wiki to make the meeting archive more complete and useful.
There were 165 CEDAR posters compared to 156 from last year and 131 GEM posters. The poster sessions were from 4-7 PM on Tuesday and Wednesday, where the CEDAR posters were separated into 64 Mesosphere-Lower-Thermosphere (MLT) on Tuesday 101 Ionosphere-Thermosphere (IT) or magnetosphere posters on Wednesday. The GEM poster times were selected by the presenters with 98 on Tuesday and 33 on Wednesday for a total of about 300 posters with late additions. There were 108 CEDAR student posters, 14 with undergraduate first authors, and 83 in the student poster competition, 5 more than last year. Prizes were a certificate, and text books for the first and second place winners. The judges picked first place winners Chihoko Yamashita (second place winner in 2009 and 2010) with MLT-MLTG-17 and Xianjing Liu with IT-SOLA-01, both PhD students at the University of Colorado. Chihoko is a student of Xinzhao Chu and chose the book 'Mesoscale Dynamics' by Yuh-Lang Lin (courtesy of the University of Alaska), while Xianjing is a student of Jeffrey Thayer and chose the Schunk and Nagy 'Ionospheres: Physics, Plasma Physics, and Chemistry' book courtesy of Bob Schunk. Second place winners were Burcu Kosar with MLT-SPRT-01, PhD student of Ningyu Liu of the Florida Institute of Technology and Yanshi Huang with IT-SOLA-05, PhD student of Yue Deng of the University of Texas at Arlington. Both got copies of the 'Comparative Aeronomy' book edited by Andy Nagy and courtesy of him. Thanks to Andy Nagy, Bob Schunk, and the University of Alaska for providing the books. Honorable mentions went to Elizabeth Bass of Boston University with MLT-METR-02, Sotirios Mallios of the Pennsylvania State University with MLT-SPRT-06, Henrique Aveiro of Cornell University with IT-EQIT-05, and Roger Varney of Cornell with IT-EQIT-12. Undergraduate student honorable mentions went to Edward Grabenhorst of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University with MLT-MLTG-06, Stoyan Ivanov of Goddard Space Flight Center and Georgia Tech with IT-EQIT-17, Genevieve Plant of Boston University with IT-ITIT-06, and Robert Andrew Stillwell of the University of Colorado with MLT-MLTL-09. Thanks to the chief judges, Mark Conde of the University of Alaska and Gary Bust of Atmospheric & Space Technology Research Associates, thanks to all their judges who spent so much of their time judging the posters, and thanks to all the students who participated in the student poster competition.
In 2012, we go back to the Eldorado Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the students will be placed in the Hilton and Las Palomas Hotels. The Student Workshop is Sunday June 24, and should be open to non-students, while the regular meeting starts Monday June 25 and ends around noon on Friday June 29.