Convenor: David Hysell
Wednesday, June 16 3:25-5:30 PM
This workshop is intended to provide a forum for discussing new developments and latest results from our investigation of the low latitude atmosphere and ionosphere. It is being held in lieu of a traditional MISETA or Friends of Jicamarca workshops with the hope of appealing to their traditional audience but also to a more inclusive one. The contemporary emphasis on space weather has led to renewed, broad interest in equatorial plasma instabilities and irregularities and their effects on communication systems, and this workshop is being called to address those issues in particular.
The timeliness of the workshop stems in part from a series of instrumental upgrades which are either existing or planned for the equatorial zone. Upgrades at Jicamarca over the past few years have led to at least a half dozen new observing modes which are greatly expanding our appreciation of the aeronomic and plasma processes underway in the equatorial {\em E} and {\em F} regions. Thanks largely to MISETA investigators, chain science is underway in the equatorial zone, fostered by additional and improved Fabry Perot interferometers and a proliferation of optical imagers and radio scintillation receivers throughout South America. Our South American colleagues have also contributed new instrumentation to the investigation, including an array of ionosondes, a new coherent scatter radar in Alcantara, Brazil, and a new round of ionospheric investigations at the Piura radar. Finally, the last few years have witnessed improvements to the NCAR GCM relevant to analyses of the equatorial zone along with new computer models of interchange, gradient drift, and Farley-Buneman plasma instabilities.
The growth and evolution of {\em F} region plasma irregularities, their effects on radiowave propagation, and our ability to forecast or now-cast those effects based on ground based diagnostic equipment and space weather information has been a focus of the equatorial aeronomy community within CEDAR. At present, there is more instrumentation than ever available for developing and refining prediction techniques. There also seem to be more individual and group efforts (MISETA, EPIC, ...) than ever being directed toward the forecasting problem. This workshop is being organized in part also to familiarize the community with these efforts. We hope that the workshop will culminate in a general discussion of where we stand as a community with regard to forecasting and of what additional diagnostics or models are necessary to help the effort along.
We invite presentations in any area of equatorial aeronomy (experimental or theoretical, upper atmospheric or ionospheric) and in particular solicit those presentations that may be space weather related. If you would like to make a brief presentation, please notify Dave Hysell (dhysell@clemson.edu) or Mike Kelley (mikek@anise.ee.cornell.edu) about your topic and come prepared with a few viewgraphs.