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2017 Workshop Summary

CEDAR 2017

18-23 June 2017
Keystone Resort, Colorado

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The NSF Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) upper atmospheric community met from Sunday, June 18 through Friday, June 23 at the Keystone Resort, Colorado. Due to difficulties of securing a location the CEDAR workshop was in the same week as the NSF Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) workshop, which took place in Portsmouth, VA. The CEDAR workshop started on Sunday with the student workshop under the theme “Modelling and Data Analysis Synergy”. The student workshop was organized by the students and was very well attended. The presentations, given by non-students, covered topics from observations to modeling as well as data assimilation. Non-students were welcomed to attend the student workshop.



A total of 325 participants registered via the CEDAR website among them 114 CEDAR students or Postdocs. The number of participants is less than in 2016 (345 participants) which was a joint GEM-CEDAR workshop and in 2015 (348 participants). The number of students has decreased from 2016 (136 students) and 2015 (143 students). The CEDAR participants came from 86 different institutions which is an increase from the 76 institutions in 2016. The participants were from 12 different countries, from the USA , Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Japan, Netherlands, Peru, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Kingdom. In 2017 there were 20 international institutions presented at CEDAR. This is an increase from previous years with 13 (2016), 17 (2015), but lower that in 2014 with 25 institutions. There were 49 universities (50 in 2016), 16 laboratories (20 in 2016), and 11 businesses (6 in 2016) presented at the CEDAR workshop.



Overall 69 participants were new to the CEDAR workshop (69 in 2016). 54 of first time attendants were students (47% of all students). There were 12 undergraduate students (16 in 2016), and 21 students (19 in 2016) came from 15 foreign institutions (11 in 2016) and including one student from the Jicamarca Observatory. The number of undergraduates declined, the number of foreign students steadily increased from 15 (2015), 19 (2016) and 21 (2017) which indicated that the CEDAR workshop is internationally recognized as a prime meeting for students in the field. Since funding depended on presenting a poster, all but 4 students presented a poster at the poster sessions, and 1 student presented 2 posters. All poster presenters got wiki logins to be able to upload their posters, which was required for the 84 students in the student poster competition. 45 non-student posters (50 in 2016, 50 in 2015) were presented or about 29% of the total CEDAR posters.

Posters

There were 153 CEDAR posters (2016: 171 posters) at two poster sessions from 4-7 PM on Tuesday and Wednesday, where the CEDAR posters were separated into 78 Mesosphere-Lower-Thermosphere (MLT), Instrumentation and Coupling posters on Tuesday and 75 Ionosphere-Thermosphere (IT) posters on Wednesday. There were 113 CEDAR student presenters, including 11 undergraduate posters. 84 posters were in the student poster competition. Prizes were a certificate, and one of the text books "Ionospheres: Physics, Plasma Physics, and Chemistry" courtesy of co-author Bob Schunk (USU), the e-book “Understanding Space Weather and the Physics Behind It” courtesy of author Delores Knipp (CU Boulder) and books from the "Heliophysics" series (edited by Karel Schrijver, George Sisco, Fran Bagenal, and Jan Sojka) for the first place winners.

The poster prize winners are:

IT 1st prize

IT 2nd place

IT Honorable mention

MLT Honorable mention 

Graduate MLT Honorable mention 

MLT 1st place

MLT 2nd place

Thanks to the chief judges, Ethan Miller, Lynn Harvey, Ed Mierkiewicz and Astrid Maute, and thanks to the 24 IT and MLT judges for their discussions and giving their best in identifying the winners. Thanks to all the students who participated in the student poster competition and to their advisors.

The CEDAR Student Workshop on Sunday was guided by the theme "Modeling and Data Analysis Synergy" and the CEDAR organizer was Meghan Burleigh from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Lindsay Goodwin from the University of Saskatchewan. Lindsay Goodwin took over from Victoriya Forsythe who had to resign from the CSSC due to personal matters. The students organized a very diverse set of presentations highlighting the challenges combining data and modelling to study the atmosphere-ionosphere-magnetosphere system. The student workshop ended with a professional development presentation about effective communication, and the student soccer game. The new CEDAR student representative joining Meghan Burleigh is Nithin Sivadas from Boston University. The students also had dinner with a group of selected scientists, and lunch with a science focus panel.

The 28th CEDAR Prize Lecture was given in the Monday plenary session by Delores Knipp from University of Colorado, Boulder. Delores gave a great presentation with the title “Nitric Oxide: How the thermosphere 'fights back' during intense storms” (pdf) The Distinguished Lecture was given by Arthur Richmond from the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Art’s presentation with the title “Perspectives on Ionospheric Electrodynamics” (pdf) described the work done on ionospheric electrodynamics over the last decades, highlighting the contributions from many different people. On Tuesday morning NSF represented by Ruth Lieberman (Aeronomy), John Meriwether (Facilities), Irfan Azeem (Space Weather) gave an update, which was followed up by an impromptu lunch meeting (organized by Jeff Thayer) on Wednesday for more in-depth discussion. Barbara Emery was recognized for her tremendous work in organizing all the past CEDAR workshops. The workshop included two tutorial, one given by Jeff Thayer with the title “Plasma-Neutral Interactions in the MLT-X (80-200 km altitude range)” (pdf) in connection with the Grand Challenge Workshop, and one by Yolanda Gil (U. Southern California) with the title “The Geoscience Paper of the Future: Practical Guidelines for Adopting Digital Scholarship, Reproducible Research, and Open Science” (pdf), which sparked discussions in the CEDAR community. We had 6 science highlights and two post-doc reports. The CEDAR workshop included 31 individual workshops. The joint banquet was on Thursday with a presentation about “ham radio” and the use for science. The CEDAR workshop adjourned on Friday at noon. 2017 was the fourth year of Grand Challenge (GC) workshops. Three GC workshops still continued and no new one was added in 2017. See the list of Grand Challenge Workshops. In general GC workshops meet for 4 hrs and provide tutorials about their science in the plenary session. In 2017 not all GC workshop requested 4hrs workshops and not all requested tutorial time. The final reports of the two ending GC workshops about “Grand Challenge MLT-X: Frontiers in Science and Sensing” and “The High Latitude Geospace System: Frontiers in science and sensing” will be presented at the 2018 CEDAR workshop. The CEDAR Prize lecture, the Distinguish Lecture, and the tutorials were videotaped and are all available at CEDAR Turorials and are also linked on the 2017 Agenda  along with .pdf files.

Apart from the Sunday Student Workshop, there were 31 individual CEDAR workshops, including the three Grand Challenge workshops. We had 38, 26, 31, 24, and 32 individual workshops in 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012, respectively. All presentations of the plenary session can be viewed on the 2017 Workshop Agenda.

For 2018, the CEDAR Workshop will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from 24-29 June 2018, right after the GEM workshop. Being back-to-back with GEM gives the GEM and CEDAR community the opportunity to organize a common day at the in-between weekend and attend a few days of the other workshop.