The Thirteenth International Conference on Substorms (ICS13); Portsmouth, New Hampshire; September 24-29, 2017

University Of New Hampshire, Durham NH

Investigators

Abstract

This is a travel support for students, and some senior researchers from less developed countries, along with a small contribution to supplies and publication costs for a five-day international conference on geomagnetic substorm research. This meeting entitled, "International Conference on Substorms (ICS13)" will be held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire during 24-29 September 2017. The ICS13 will be the 13th in a series of carefully-designed substorm conferences that build on past advances while incorporating the latest new development. The venue is aimed at creating a forum to bring together a worldwide cadre of substorm researchers (and students) to focus their combined talents as well as theoretical and observational assets on accelerating progress towards a fundamental understanding of substorm physics. Such an environment, which intermixes a wide variety of viewpoints and diverse participants, provides a known incubator for new and innovative approaches that have the potential for enabling breakthroughs. This environment is also a valuable educational experience for students and an opportunity for international networking. The dates for the workshop were selected so that scientific team meetings for several operating scientific missions making relevant measurements might be organized to overlap with the conference. As many as 150 participants are anticipated with an estimated 35 participants requiring travel support - half of this participant support is requested from NSF, the other half from NASA. Following the event, a peer-reviewed conference proceedings will be published in an open-access, electronic-only periodical to enable broad dissemination of the results. Geomagnetic substorms, the topical focus of the conference, are explosive energy releases in geospace that have disruptive consequences in regions from near-Earth space, where weather, communications and national security satellites orbit; to the underlying upper atmosphere and ionosphere, where associated mega-ampere currents flow endangering vulnerable assets both in low-earth orbit and on the ground. There is even evidence to suggest that effects of this disruption may penetrate into the middle atmosphere through chemical-dynamical processes with potential, but so-far elusive, effects on ozone and climate variability. The triggers of these explosive energy releases are still not fully resolved and debates over the underlying mechanisms fuel one of the most long-lived controversies in geospace research. The complicated nature of the phenomenon and the associated difficult progress toward understanding are creating impediments to developing modeling and predictive capabilities, a situation that highlights the importance of international workshops for focusing global knowledge towards a resolution.