2026 Workshop: Incoherent Scatter Working Group
Aidan Thayer
Asti Bhatt
The session will consist of a series of short update and summary presentations from representatives of ISR systems participating in world day experiments. The submitted World Day proposals will then be reviewed and discussed by attendees. After the CEDAR 2026 workshop has concluded, a finalized list of the World Day experiments for 2027 will be created, detailing requested operational conditions and time required. This list will be provided to the science and operations teams of the various instruments. The proposals will be judged on feasibility, global integration, and the number of days needed for a successful experiment, with the opportunity for feedback from the involved ISRs. If time allows, there will be a short period of time after the opening summary presentations where questions may be asked directly to representatives of the participating ISR instruments.
The operators of ISR systems around the world offer a limited number of open experiment time slots per year where they will collect data coordinated with other ISR installations in an attempt to measure large-scale and global phenomena. These open World Day experiments are meant to be competitive and available to the broader CEDAR community, and as such a centralized venue with both interested researchers and the instrument principal investigators present allows for efficient and informed discussion on the feasibility of a researcher’s request for time on the instruments. Without this session, an additional meeting would have to be arranged, presumably virtually, to coordinate the proposals of interested researchers. The workshop also allows the various ISR instruments to provide a valuable operational summary of the previous and upcoming years, including planned upgrades, known downtime for maintenance, or under-utilized functionality.