Summary of the 2007 CEDAR-DASI Workshop
The CEDAR (Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions) Workshop for 2007 was held at the Eldorado Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico from Sunday June 23 through Thursday June 28, with Friday June 29 as the day for the DASI (Distributed Arrays of Small Instruments) Workshop. A total of 300 participants, 65 coming to CEDAR for the first time, came from 73 institutions, 13 outside the United States and Puerto Rico. There were 47 universities, 18 laboratories, and 8 small businesses. Of the 113 CEDAR students and post-docs, 21 were undergraduate students, and 6 came from universities or labs in Taiwan (1), Japan (2), Peru (1) and Korea (2).
This year, we instituted a Wikipedia wiki for the workshop at http://cedarweb.hao.ucar.edu/wiki available to all participants to upload their presentations and link them via editing, or to make comments on the Forum. Workshop conveners are encouraged to edit their workshop descriptions on the wiki in order that these descriptions, linked presentations, and forum comments become their final workshop reports.
A draft of the 2008 CEDAR Workshop at Zermatt Resort in Midway Utah is also on the wiki. Many other sections of the CEDAR web pages will migrate to the wiki where members of the community can edit them.
The theme of the Student Workshop on Sunday was 'Winds in the Upper Atmosphere', arranged by Romina Nikoukar of the University of Illinois. There were two keynote tutorials given by Jeffrey Forbes of the University of Colorado on 'Dynamics of the Thermosphere' and by Arthur Richmond of HAO/NCAR on 'Neutral Winds and their Role in Ionospheric Electrodynamics'. These talks and others are available in .pdf form at http://cedarweb.hao.ucar.edu/workshop/archive/2007/agenda_2007.html and are also on the wiki for the 2007 Workshop. After 4 PM, the students had free time for soccor in the park, or swimming and volleyball at the Fort Marcy Recreation Center under the direction of Michael Nicolls of SRI, who was the second year 'student' on the CSSC (CEDAR Science Steering Committee). Michael also arranged a workshop aimed at students featuring Peter Fiske who spoke on 'Putting your Degree to Work'. Peter's book, 'Put Your Science to Work: The Take-Charge Career Guide for Scientists' published by AGU was available at the workshop and could be ordered. The new student representative joining Romina is Jonathan Fentzke of the University of Colorado.
The CEDAR Prize Lecture was given in the Monday plenary session by John Plane of the University of Leeds in the UK on 'Meteoric Smoke - Where on Earth is it?'. For the first time, the tutorials were arranged around the MLT (Mesosphere-Lower-Thermosphere) theme of the Prize Lecture. Three tutorials were presented on the following days by Diego Janches of Colorado Research Associates ('The Micrometeor Flux in the MLT'), David Siskind of the Naval Research Laboratory ('State of the Art of Modeling the Mesosphere'), and John Meriwether of Clemson University ('State of the Art in Mesophsere Science'). These talks, the student keynote lectures, and supplementary materials are available in .pdf form at http://cedarweb.hao.ucar.edu/workshop/videolist.html and are also on the wiki and are linked to the agenda. These six long talks were video-taped and are available on DVDs. Please contact Barbara Emery (emery@ucar.edu, HAO/NCAR, PO Box 3000, Boulder CO 80307) if interested in obtaining hard copies and/or DVDs.
Miguel Larsen of Clemson University gave a science highlight on 'An Overview of the 2007 Poker Flat Sounding Rocket Campaign' and Craig Heinselman updated the community on the status of AMISR at Poker Flat (PFISR). Peter Fox of HAO/NCAR spoke on the 'CEDAR Database Update and Virtual Observatories'. Richard Behnke of NSF informed the community about NSF and the NSF Small Satellite initiative. This was followed by a workshop on Small Satellites on Wednesday that included a working pizza lunch. We heard four CEDAR Post-Doc reports by Endawoke Yizengaw of the University of California in Los Angeles, Mitsum Eijiri of Utah State University, Joseph Comberiate of Applied Physics Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University, and Ningyu Liu at the Pennsylvania State University. Most of these talks are on-line linked to the agenda and are also on the wiki.
Including the Student and DASI Workshops, there were 27 workshops total, one less than last year. Final reports for most of the specific workshops will be at: http://cedarweb.hao.ucar.edu/workshop/archive/2007/wklist_2007.html and on the wiki, where we hope many presenters will upload their materials.
There were 119 posters at the Monday and Tuesday poster sessions, including 74 student posters (14 less than last year), of which 59 took part in the student poster competition. Prizes were a certificate and a selection of classic books, most donated by Alan Peterson of Whitworth College. The judges picked first place winners from each session, Matthew Zettergren (POI-03) of Boston University who chose the two-book set by Banks and Kockarts, and Jeremy Riousset (SPR-01) of the Pennsylvania State University who chose a book by Houghton. The second place winners were Chad Carlson (ITI-04) of the University of Illinois (Chamberlain aurora book), and Ashley Wiren (MLT-01) of the University of Colorado (Humphreys book). Honorable mentions were Tzu-Wei (Vicky) Fang (EQU-03) of the National Central University in Taiwan who is visiting at NCAR (Johnson and Killeen edited book), Shasha Zou (STI-04) of UCLA (Omholt book), Chunmei Kang (MLT-04) of the University of Colorado (Brasseur and Solomon book), and Alexander Hassiotis (GWM-02) of the Pennsylvania State University (Gossard and Hooke book). A special undergraduate award was also given to Roger Varney (GWI-02) of Cornell University (Deepak book). Thanks to Alan Peterson and all the judges who spent so much of their time judging the posters.
We took a 48-passenger bus from Boulder, Colorado to Santa Fe and back with between 8 and 13 passengers. This bus was then used for trips and to take students back and forth between Fort Marcy Suites and the Eldorado Hotel. We took the bus for a shopping expedition at Tin-Nee-Ann's Trading Company on Monday, and to a Santa Fe Destinations tour of Chimayo and the view from White Rock by Los Alamos.
The 2008 CEDAR Workshop will go to Zermatt Resort in Midway, Utah from Monday June 16 (Student Workshop) to Saturday June 21 in order to overlap with the joint GEM/SHINE Workshop at Zermatt from Sunday June 22 to Friday June 27. We will return to the Eldorado Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2009 from Sunday June 28 (Student Workshop) to noon on Friday July 3.
Summary of the 2007 CEDAR Tutorials
This year the workshop tutorials were selected to provide more in-depth
review of the background and state-of-the-art research and knowledge of
the topic that was selected for the prize lecture given by Dr. John Plane.
We were honored that Diego Janches (CORA division of NWRA) gave the
lead-off tutorial on the topic of meteor observations titled "The
micrometeor flux in the MLT". Beginning with a summary highlighting the
significant milestones involving meteor observations within the CEDAR
community (including his CEDAR postdoc award in 2001), Diego listed the
reasons why meteors are of interest to CEDAR: (1) they tell us about the
neutral winds and large-scale atmospheric dynamics, (2) they are the
source of mass input for various atmospheric phenomena, (3) they allow us
to study meteor plasma physics, and (4) they are a space hazard.
The remainder of Diego's tutorial was focused on the questions of "How much mass is coming?", "Where is it coming from?" and what is the CEDAR community doing to solve these questions. Diego showed that current models for the mass flux do not accurately predict the total mass input over the range of observations. He then showed that the two questions were actually linked and that source of the meteors had a big impact on the observations. He discussed the importance of understanding observational biases and showed promising modeling results which give good agreement with observations when the relative contributions of the sources of meteors, atmospheric effects and instrument response functions are taken into account.
David Siskind's tutorial was entitled "State of the Art of Mesospheric Modeling". It began by discussing the various three dimensional global models of the mesosphere, emphasizing the differences between climate models and weather models. He gave a specific example of each, with the NCAR/WACCM model being representative of the former and the NRL/NOGAPS-ALPHA (Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction System-Advanced Level Physics High Altitude) being representative of the latter. He then gave a brief summary of recent WACCM work in modeling trends in middle atmospheric ozone, temperature and water vapor based upon a recent publication in JGR by Garcia et al. In brief, the simulated trends in ozone and temperature were in good agreement with historical observations, but the water vapor trend was not. This may be due to low frequency interannual atmospheric variability not yet accounted for by the WACCM model.
The rest of his talk was an in depth discussion of recent work using NOGAPS-ALPHA to hindcast unusual mesospheric meteorological conditions observed in recent NH winters. The data come from the NASA/TIMED-SABER instrument and they show a 30 km vertical displacement of the winter stratopause in early 2006 and 2004. These years also coincide with enhanced transport of nitric oxide from the thermosphere to the stratosphere. Siskind summarized several NOGAPS-ALPHA simulations with various different parameterizations of orographic and non-orographic gravity waves. He concluded that the filtering of these waves during the strong stratospheric warming of late January and early February 2006 led to the anomalous mesospheric wind and temperature patterns. Since the filtering of mesospheric gravity waves is governed by the large scale stratospheric flow and since these waves, in turn, ultimately impact the degree to which NO from the thermosphere is transported to the stratosphere, the study of mesospheric variability adds a new paradigm to solar-terrestrial studies. Rather than simply considering various solar and geomagnetic cycles, Siskind concluded that one needs to consider the meteorological state of the entire atmosphere as an important mediating factor in solar-terrestrial coupling.
John Meriwether of Clemson University gave a tutorial on the 'State of the Art in Mesosphere Science'.
Summary of the 2007 CEDAR Student Poster Competition
This year's poster competition was organized by Anthea Coster, Rick Doe, and Diego Janches of the CSSC with the help of Barbara Emery, Susan Baltuch, and the support of the 11 volunteer poster judges. The competition was organized so that each poster was seen by a minimum of two judges, and each student had at least one judge stopping by their poster to discuss it with them. There were a total of 59 student posters (of approximately 120 posters in total). There were 28 in the Ionosphere-Thermosphere-Magnetosphere (ITM) section and 31 posters in the Mesosphere - Lower Thermosphere (MLT) section.
The first place winners of the two sections were:
First Place
Eight undergraduate students participated in the competition. One student Roger Hale Varney of Cornell University was recognized with a special undergraduate award, for the poster: "Observations of Electric Fields Associated with Internal Gravity Waves."
In addition, this year each section had a second place winner and two honorable mentions.
This year the second place winners were:
Second Place
The poster judges recognized a number of very high quality posters this year making the decision process difficult. Nevertheless, they provided their opinions as to what factors, other than the quality of the research, that were important to them in their judging. Their advise to students who plan on entering next years competition is given here:
We would like to thank Barbara Emery, our judges, and all of the students who participated in this year's competition.
Anthea Coster, Rick Doe, Diego Janches
Pictures from the 2007 CEDAR-DASI Workshop
A place for uploading
pictures and describing them will be made on the wiki under the 2007 Workshop pages.
Any identifications of ? to emery@ucar.edu would be welcome.