2023 Workshop: Distributed instrument networks

Much of the work done over the past decades in investigating various scales were limited to standalone instruments, often co-located with major facilities. Our ability to achieve an in-depth understanding of the coupling and transport of energy across these scales is hampered by our inability to make coordinated observations of the necessary physical drivers, which can often be separated by large distances between cause and effect. In order to understand how drivers of energy and momentum at multiple scales and over large distances manifest as variability in the geospace system, observations at various spatial scales spanning large distances need to be obtained.
The Heliophysics decadal survey 2013 and the mid-term assessment of the decadal survey goals have identified that the Atmosphere-Ionosphere-Magnetosphere Interaction priorities are well served by distributed instruments. The mid-term assessment states: “Distributed observational capabilities increasingly enforce the realization that the geospace system, from below the ionosphere to the outer reaches of the magnetosphere, is a single connected system”. As the first NSF-DASI funded networks are getting realized, it is time to assess how these distributed instrument can serve the science needs and what new capabilities are required.