------------------------------------------------------------------ Minutes of the June 26, 1999 meeting of the GEM Steering Committee ------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Dick Wolf (wolf@alfven.rice.edu) Snowmass Village, Colorado. 8:00 am-12:05pm on 6/26/99 Attending: K. Baker, R. Clauer, B. Fraser, Y. Galperin, R. Greenwald, M. Hesse, M. Hudson, H. Kawano, L. Kepko, J. Kozyra, L. Lyons, T. Moretto, C. Russell, H. Singer, R. Smith, R. Wolf APPENDIX D. CANADIAN REPORT Prepared by Rick Sydora Below is an update on the activities of 4 key elements to the Geospace Environment Modeling Program in Canada. I. Facility for Data Assimilation and Modeling (FDAM) This a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) funded effort under the CSA Long Term Space Plan (LTSP) III and represents an expansion of effort in the area of space weather activities. It is viewed as a national facility with international partners designed to fulfill tasks such as: - develop data assimilation methods and tools to integrate data streams from Canadian space weather superarrays - develop models which use Canadian data to specify conditions of the space environment - develop models and algorithms to simulate space weather processes - provide computational power for data visualization and model prototyping - represent Canada in international modeling collaborations There is a plan to develop predictors for magnetospheric and electrojet activity as well as continue computational research into substorm instability models. A more detailed review of the plans can be found in a report prepared by William Liu and Robert Rankin of the Univ. of Alberta and David Boteler, Geological Survey of Canada and the report represents a national consensus of the Canadian space science community . The web site is: http://ww2.dan.sp-agency.ca/SpaceWeather/intro.htm II. SuperDARN With regard to the high frequency radar system which studies the Earth's ionosphere, the Canadian Space Agency has approved funding for the radar to be built at Prince George. III. CANOPUS Array Future plans are evolving on CANOPUS 2. With present CSA budgets the only plan now is to soon upgrade the All Sky Imagers(ASI). The magnetometer and meridian scanning photometer arrays will remain essentially the same for the time being. I am appending the more complete description of CANOPUS prepared by Gordon Rostoker. IV. MultiMedia and Advanced Computing Infrastructure (MACI) This is a western Canadian initiative centered around the Univ. of Alberta and Univ. of Calgary, to expand current parallel supercomputing facilities. Existing facilities under the first phase of the project, last year, provided us with a 42-node SGI-Origin 2000 computer at the Univ. of Alberta and a 28-node DEC-alpha cluster at the Univ. of Calgary. It was just announced a few days ago that phase II of the project was fully funded under the Canadian Foundation for Innovation(CFI) federal program with provincial matching funds providing us with 7M (US), dollars over the next 2 years. Plans are to expand both computing facilities to 128 nodes. DETAILED REPORT ON THE CANADIAN SPACE AGENCY'S CANOPUS ARRAY (Prepared by Gordon Rostoker) CANOPUS is a thirteen station array of remote sensing platforms distributed over western Canada stretching from the west coast of Hudson Bay to near the Yukon-Alaska border and from the edge of the Arctic Ocean to close to the U.S.-Canada border. The locations of the sites are shown in the Figure. Each site is equipped with a three component ringcore fluxgate magnetometer and a 30 MHz riometer, with four of the sites also possessing multi-wavelength meridian scanning photometers and one site (Gillam) featuring a digital all-sky imager (ASI).The magnetometers have a dynamic range of (=3D/ -) 80,000 nT and a sensitivity of (1/40) nT. The primary wavelengths sampled by the meridian scanning photometers are 557.7 nm, 630.0 nm, 486.1 nm and 470.9 nm while the wavelengths sampled by the ASI are 557.7 nm and 630.0 nm. Data from the sites are transmitted through the Anik communications satellite to Ottawa and is made available in near real time to participating scientists. The magnetometer and riometer data are sampled at 8 Hz on site, however the values transmitted are 5-second averages for those parameters. The MPA operates at one scan from south to north and return every one minute, however high resolution data now available at some sites yields the data over the latitude range scanned every 30 s. The ASI produces images once every minute in its normal operating mode. The data can, of course, be sampled at a higher rate if one installs recorders at the campaign ports located at each site. The data are archived in Ottawa and made available to the nodes of the CANOPUS network and to selected CANOPUS Science Team members. A more detailed description of CANOPUS can be found in Rostoker et al.[1995]. CANOPUS data can be viewed in near real time data on the World Wide Web at http://www.dan.sp-agency.ca/www/canopus_home.html and interested researchers may gain access to limited amounts of CANOPUS data for use in their research through use of the order form on that web page. There is also a space weather nowcasting web page http://www.space .ualberta.ca/canopus.html where near real time estimates of auroral oval local and activity level can be found. The CANOPUS data are primarily used to pinpoint onset times and locations of magnetospheric disturbances, particularly substorms and propagating auroral features. This information is important for researchers studying data acquired by satellite borne detectors as these researchers cannot readily distinguish between spatial and temporal effects. The north-south Churchill line of seven stations at the eastern edge of=20 the array is capable of monitoring changes in the size of the polar cap and, as such, provides a means of monitoring changes in the energy stored in the earth's magnetotail. The combined use of measurements of hydrogen emissions (H beta at 486.1 nm) with the more conventional green and red auroral emissions provides proxy measurements of changes in plasma sheet topology. CANOPUS will continue to operate at least to the end of the 1999 in keeping with the commitment of the Canadian Space Agency to participate in the GGS/ISTP program. Now that we are near that time, the importance of continued ground based measurements in the study of the solar-terrestrial interaction are being evaluated as will the potential for CANOPUS type arrays to contribute to forecasts and nowcasts directed towards operational "Space Weather" needs. At this time expansion is being considered into eastern Canada to support space weather nowcasting activities and into western Canada to support the new Prince George SuperDARN radar presently under construction. As well it has been proposed to extend the Churchill line southward by the addition of a station near Minneapolis in order to provide better coverage of the equatorward edge of the auroral oval during geomagnetic storm activity. Finally, it should be noted that the University of Calgary is devoting a great deal of effort to developing a new generation of All-Sky Imagers, and it is hoped that several more CANOPUS sites will ultimately be equipped with ASI's to provide a better picture of the two dimensional structure of auroral activity. CANOPUS is presently fully funded by the Canadian Space Agency at a cost of approximately $1M (U.S.) per year. Long Term Space Plan funding appears to be in place to ensure continued operation of the next generation of ground-based arrays. SuperDARN will be funded, in part, through the successor to the CANOPUS program and existing CANOPUS funds have already been deployed to support the construction of the Prince George radar.=20 Data can be requested through the WWW CANOPUS home page, and are made available subject to the Rules of the Road described on that web page. The main rule is that, if CANOPUS data are used in a study, a CANOPUS Team member should have the opportunity to participate in that study so long as they can make a significant intellectual contribution. Whether or not a CANOPUS Team member participates, users of CANOPUS data are asked to acknowledge the Canadian Space Agency using a phrase "CANOPUS was constructed and is operated by the Canadian Space Agency." At the present time, all matters pertaining to interaction with the scientific community are managed by the Principal Investigator, Dr. Gordon Rostoker at the University of Alberta (rostoker@space.ualberta.ca). A new Principal Investigator for the Program will be selected by the end of 1999. Reference: Rostoker, G., J.C. Samson, F. Creutzberg, T.J. Hughes, D.R. McDiarmid, A.G. McNamara, A. Vallance Jones, D.D. Wallis and L.L. Cogger, CANOPUS- a ground-based instrument array for remote sensing the high latitude ionosphere during the ISTP/GGS program, Space Sci. Rev., 71 , 743, 1995.