2016 Workshop Summary
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Summary
The NSF Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) upper atmospheric community met jointly with the NSF Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) magnetospheric community from Sunday June 19 through Friday June 24 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the Eldorado Hotel and in the Santa Fe Convention Center. We last met with GEM in Santa Fe in 2011, and then before in 2005. The joint CEDAR-GEM Student Workshop was held Sunday in the Anasazi Ballroom of the Eldorado Hotel. Non-students could attend starting with the first Faculty Tutorial at 1055AM. Most of the Student Tutorials were earlier in the morning. The GEM Student Workshop is traditionally given by students, and is not open to non-students, while the CEDAR Student Workshop is traditionally given by faculty, and is open to all. This joint CEDAR-GEM Student Tutorial was a blend of our two traditions.
A total of 347 participants registered via the CEDAR website among them 127 CEDAR students or CEDAR Postdocs. The number of participants is slightly higher than in 2015. The CEDAR participants came from 76 different institutions, 13 located outside the United States and Puerto Rico. There might be a steady decline of different international institutions with 25 and 17 foreign institutions in 2014 and 2015, respectively, however not necessarily foreign participants. There were 50 universities, 20 laboratories, and 6 small businesses.
Overall 69 participants were new to the CEDAR workshop, and, 51 of them were students (approximately 40% of attending students). 16 were undergraduate students, and 19 students came from 11 foreign institutions and with one student from the Jicamarca Observatory. While the number of undergraduates is almost the same, the number of foreign students increased from 15 in 2015 to 19 in 2016 which supports the fact that CEDAR is a prime meeting for students in the field. Since funding depended on presenting a poster, all but 3 students presented a poster at the poster sessions, where 1 student presented 2 posters. The students who did not present posters had an oral presentation or did not receive travel support. All poster presenters got wiki logins to be able to upload their posters, which was required for the 93 students in the student poster competition. 50 non-student posters (50 in 2015) were presented or about 29% of the total CEDAR posters.
There were 171 CEDAR posters at two poster sessions from 4-7 PM on Tuesday and Wednesday, where the CEDAR posters were separated into 66 Mesosphere-Lower-Thermosphere (MLT) posters on Tuesday and 105 Ionosphere-Thermosphere (IT) posters on Wednesday. There were 123 CEDAR student presenters, including 18 undergraduate posters, where 93 posters were in the student poster competition. Prizes were a certificate, and the text book "Ionospheres: Physics, Plasma Physics, and Chemistry" courtesy of co-author Bob Schunk (USU) or books from the "Heliophysics" series (edited by Karel Schrijver, George Sisco, Fran Bagenal, and Jan Sojka) for the first place winners. The judges picked first place IT winner Ryan McGranaghan from the University of Colorado with DATA-04 (pdf). The second place IT winner was Brian Harding of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with ITIT-21. The competition was tough and the judges decided that there was no clear winner for honorable mention. The undergraduate honorable mention for the MLT session went to Jacob Engle from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University with SPRT-01 (pdf). The graduate honorable mention for MLT went to Levi Boggs from Florida Institute of Technology with STRA-02. The second place MLT winner was Cornelius Csar Jude Salinas of National Central University, Taiwan with COUP-01. The first place winner in MLT was Vu Nguyen from the University of Colorado, Boulder with COUP-05 who had previously won honorable mention last year. Thanks to the chief judges, Ed Mierkiewicz and Astrid Maute, and thanks to the 16 IT judges and 10 MLT judges who spent so much of their time judging the posters. Thanks to all the students who participated in the student poster competition and to their advisors. See pictures of the poster sessions and the list of winners (pdf).
The joint GEM/CEDAR Student Workshop on Sunday was guided by the topic "The Basics of CEDAR/GEM Science" and the CEDAR organizer was Victoriya Forsythe of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the most recent CEDAR student representative, with help from the second year student representative Lindsay Goodwin from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. In the students-only morning session, students gave tutorials and organized an ice breaker. The afternoon was open to everybody and covered with faculty tutorials. The annual soccer game concluded the student workshop. The new CEDAR student representative joining Victoriya Forsythe is Meghan Burleigh of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. The students also had dinner with a career focus panel and lunch with a science focus panel.
The 27th CEDAR Prize Lecture was given in the Wednesday plenary session by Meers Oppenheim of Boston University. His title was “Simulating the Ionosphere, one electron at a time” (pdf). No Distinguished Lecture was selected in 2016 to give priority to the joint meeting. The joint GEM/CEDAR community had the opportunity to listen to agency updates from NSF represented by John Meriwether, Carrie Black, Therese Jorgensen, Janet Kozyra and Ruth Lieberman, from NOAA/SWPC by Tom Berger and NASA by Dan Moses. An hour plenary time was dedicated to the NSF Geospace Portfolio Review (updates presented by Bill Lotko, chair), the 2.5 days "Quo Vadis" workshop with a summary presented by Dave Hysell, and information about Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) awards at NSF presented by John Meriwether. Time allowed discussion and questions from the community. The joint banquet was on Thursday with "Simple Speak" presentations from several community members explaining their science using only the most common 1000 "simple" English words. The CEDAR workshop adjourned on Friday at noon while GEM continued with individual workshops into the afternoon.
2016 was the third year of Grand Challenge (GC) Workshops. A third GC workshop was chosen in 2015 by the CSSC, "Storms and Substorms Without Borders" headed by Naomi Maruyama of the University of Colorado. No special tutorial speakers for the GC workshops were chosen in 2016 due to the joint meeting. As in 2015, Grand Challenge workshops met 4 hours total, while most other CEDAR workshops were limited to 2 hours. The CEDAR community also joined in some of the 13 GEM focus groups which often met for longer time periods.
The CEDAR Prize lecture, the GEM/CEDAR tutorials, and three CEDAR tutorials were videotaped. These plenary talks are all available as videos for the seventh year. The .pdf and videos of the video-taped talks are also linked on the 2016 Agenda along with .pdf files of other plenary talks.
Some workshop talks are linked to individual workshop pages, where workshop conveners and speakers are encouraged to add .pdf files their talks to the wiki to make the meeting archive more complete and useful. Apart from the Sunday Student Workshop, there were 15 individual CEDAR workshops and 23 joint CEDAR/GEM workshops, including the three Grand Challenge workshops. We had 26, 31, 24, and 32 individual workshops in 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012.
For 2017, the CEDAR Workshop will be held at the Keystone Conference Center and Lodge, Keystone, CO from 18-23 June 2017. GEM will be the same week in Portsmouth, VA. In 2018 back to back workshops in Santa Fe, NM could be organized with GEM from 17-22 June, 2018, and CEDAR the following week from 24-29 June, 2018. Although not a joint meeting it gives an opportunity to have some overlap in between the two meetings.