*************************** ** THE GEM MESSENGER ** *************************** Volume 7, Number 34 August 1, 1997 ----------------------------------------------------------- Report on the GEM Steering Committee Meeting, June 21, 1997 ----------------------------------------------------------- From: W. Jeffrey Hughes (HUGHES at buasta.bu.edu) New Steering Committee Chair: We welcomed Dick Wolf as our new Steering Committee Chair. With this report my responsibilities as Chair end (but certainly not my involvment with GEM), and I wish Dick every success. Report from Washington: Bob Clauer reported on the status of the MAG Program and GEM. He expects a modest growth (3-5%) in total MAG funding next year. The GEM funding is stable. About 20 MAG proposals were recieved for the latest round of the Space Weather Program. He expects to fund about 5. There was also a good response to the new plasma physics initative. As usual GEM proposals will have a mid-October target date, with an emphasis this time on the inner magnetosphere/storm campaign. Bob reminded us that his term at the Foundation ends next March (it seems awfully short) and that a search is underway for his successor. Next Year's Meeting: Next year the GEM Snowmass workshop will again be during the third week in June (June 15-19). (Mark your calendars NOW!) The Silvertree and Snowmass continue to grow in popularity with other groups, with whom we are increasingly in competition. CEDAR will be meeting in Boulder the prior week (June 7-13) so CEDAR and GEM will be meeting on consecutive weeks as usual. Our new Workshop Coordinator, John Freeman, with the able assistance of Umbe Cantu, will be organising this meeting. 1999 Workshop: The tentative plan for the following year is to have both GEM and CEDAR the same week, June 14-18 1999, as an experiment. If you have strong opinions about this, please let either John or Dick Wolf know. Organisation and Leadership of Campaigns: The steering committee discussed how to best organise GEM as it grows and we get used to having multiple ongoing campaigns. Several working group co-chairs had asked for their positions to be rotated. Furthermore, several people at the Workshop had complained about too many conflicting parallel sessions. Taking all this into account, we decided to make some changes. At next year's workshop campaigns will be run more in parallel than previously (though not completely in parallel, details we be decided at our December meeting). The number of working groups will be reduced and the topics they cover better defined to reduce overlap. To provide more cohesion within each campaign, each campaign will have a Campaign Convenor, whose job, among other things, will be to coordinate between the working groups to minimize overlap and also ensure that important topics are covered somewhere. Finally, although the boundary layer campaign is now over, the steering committee felt that we will need to keep discussing some aspects of boundary layers, especially as they relate to the GGCM, and to the ionosphere. In order to provide a forum for these discussions, we decided to organise a new (autonomous) working group on Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling that will interact with each campaign. Details of all the campaigns and working groups togther with their leaders are appended at the end of this report. Inner Magnetosphere/Storm Campaign: This was the second workshop at which this campaign met. The campaign is now underway and off to an excellent start. Mary Hudson reported that participants felt that there was too much overlap between the three working groups, and proposed reducing them to two, one on the plasmasphere and ring current, the other on the radiation belts. Mary Hudson, who has organised this campaign, will be the campaign convenor. Tail and Substorm Campaign: This campaign is now several years old, and is ready for some change in leadership. Furthermore the campaign is mature enough for the observationalists to challenge the modelers to reproduce a specific event, as was done so successfully in the boundary layer campaign. Another proposal discussed during the workshop was for the observationalists to produce a "model-independant phenomenological description of a substorm" that all models would then have to be capable of explaining. Given all this, we decided to evolve the current working groups into a new set. Larry Lyons, who has been involved with this campaign from its inception, has agreed to become campaign convenor. Jim Drake and John Lyon will be the new co-chairs of the Working Group on Quantitative Tail and Substorm Models. Mark Moldwin and Shin Ohtani will co-chair the observational Working Group that will take on the task of producing the model-independant description (the title of this working group is yet to be decided). Finally Nelson Maynard and Jimmy Raeder will coordinate the selection of an event to challenge the modelers. Working in conjunction with these efforts, Bob McPherron and Ray Lopez are building a GEM subtorm data base that will provide comprehensive observations of selected events for all to use. GGCM Campaign: We had a lengthy discussion on how to move forward with the GGCM campaign and with the development of a community GGCM. The campaign itself will continue unchanged with Michael Hesse and Dick Wolf as convenors, Jimmy Raeder and Frank Toffoletto cochairing the Spine Working Group, and Phil Pritchett and Joachim Birm cochairing the Module Working Group. As we heard from reports at the meeting, three concept studies on how to develop the GGCM are now underway. They will produce their final reports around the time of the December AGU meeting. A GGCM Steering Committee is being set up with George Siscoe as chair to advise the NSF on how to proceed in the light of these reports. This committee will include modelers, prospective users, and representatives from other interested agencies. Boundary Layer Campaign: This summer was the last meeting of the Boundary Layer Campaign, which has been very successful. There was much discussion both at the workshop and at the Steering Committee on how to keep aspects of boundary layer physics that are important to the global problem alive at GEM. A figure presented by Tom Hill during the workshop showed graphically how the ionosphere links all regions of the magnetosphere. This image provided an obvious way forward. We decided to form a new working group on magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling. This working group will provide a forum to broaden discussion to more global issues of ionospheric convection and its links to magnetospheric convection, which obviously includes boundary layers. We hope that it will act as a catalyst between campaigns (connections between dayside and nightside physics is one obvious case) and that it might later evolve or merge into a future campaign. Although boundary layers per se will no longer be part of the GEM Workshop, the IACG boundary layer campaign provides a new forum for discussion of the excellent new in-situ boundary layer observations being made by the ISTP spacecraft, as was discussed during the Boundary Layer Campaign Workshop. Reports from International Liaisons: Brian Fraser (representing Australia) told us about new instruments at several Australian sites. A new imaging riometer is being installed at Davis (74 degrees magnetic latitude) and an optical imager at Scott Base (i.e, McMurdo, 80 degrees magnetic latitude). The new SuperDARN style HF radar in Tasmania, TIGER (Tasman International Geospace Environment Radar), will come on line in 1999. It will be the lowest latitude of all the SuperDARN radars making it ideal for observing typical substorm onset latitudes (which are often equatorward of the fields-of-view of the current SuperDARN radars). This radar will also allow simultaneous day/night SuperDARN observations to be made in the same hemisphere for the first time. The possibility of obtaining intersecting beams by building a paired radar for TIGER at the southern tip of New Zealand is being explored. Rumi Nakamura (representing Japan) reported that the Geotail perigee is being lowered from 10 Re to about 9 Re. The apogee remains at 30 Re. The lower perigee will increase the chance of the dayside magnetosphere observations as well as the magnetopause skimming orbit for a wider range of the solar wind dynamic pressure. (This maneuver was successfully completed.) With this orbit, the Geotail spacecraft is expected to be fully operational (except for the eclipse time) until the spring 1999 eclipse season. She also reported that ISAS is planning to make the Exos-D data open in the same manner as Geotail data. Dr. A. Matsuoka (matsuoka at gtl.isas.ac.jp) has succeeded Dr. Obara as the contact person for Exos-D data. The 210 meridian magnetometer project will continue until at least year 2000. In spite of moving senior personnel, STEL will continue to support the 210-data base. The time delay between data being recorded and being on line varies with station location, being 1-2 months for most stations but can be as long as a year for the Russian stations as data is only shipped once a year. Current GEM Leadership GEM Steering Committee Chairman: Dick Wolf GEM Workshop Coordinator: John Freeman GEM Communications Coordinator: Chris Russell Tail/Substorm Camapign: Convenor: Larry Lyons Working Groups: Substorm Observations Working Group: Mark Moldwin and Shin Ohtani Quantitative Tail and Substorm Models Working Group: Jim Drake and John Lyon Tail/Substorm Challenge: Nelson Maynard and Jimmy Raeder Inner Magnetosphere/Storm Campaign: Convenor: Mary Hudson Working Groups: Plasmasphere and Ring Current Working Group: Jim Horwitz and Janet Kozyra Radiation Belts Working Group: Geoff Reeves and Richard Thorne GGCM Campaign: Convenors: Dick Wolf and Michael Hesse Working Groups: Spine Working Group: Jimmy Raeder and Frank Toffoletto Module Working Group: Phil Pritchett and Joachim Birn Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling Working Group: Ray Greenwald and Jeffrey Hughes +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |To add name to the mailing list, send a message to: editor at igpp.ucla.edu | |For message to whole GEM mailing list, send to: gem at igpp.ucla.edu | | | |URL of GEM Home Page: http://igpp.ucla.edu/gem/Welcome.html | |Please update your e-mail address. | |CAUTION: Do not send messages to gem at igpp.ucla.edu unless you want | | your message to go to everyone in the GEM mailing list! | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+