MIST

Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial

Latest news

Announcement of New MIST Councillors.

We are very pleased to announce the following members of the community have been elected unopposed to MIST Council:

  • Rosie Johnson (Aberystwyth University), MIST Councillor
  • Matthew Brown (University of Birmingham), MIST Councillor
  • Chiara Lazzeri (MSSL, UCL), Student Representative

Rosie, Matthew, and Chiara will begin their terms in July. This will coincide with Jasmine Kaur Sandhu, Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, and Sophie Maguire outgoing as Councillors.

The current composition of Council can be found on our website, and this will be amended in July to reflect this announcement (https://www.mist.ac.uk/community/mist-council).

Nominations are open for MIST Council

We are very pleased to open nominations for MIST Council. There are three positions available (detailed below), and elected candidates would join Georgios Nicolaou, Andy Smith, Maria-Theresia Walach, and Emma Woodfield on Council. The nomination deadline is Friday 31 May.

Council positions open for nomination

2 x MIST Councillor - a three year term (2024 - 2027). Everyone is eligible.

MIST Student Representative - a one year term (2024 - 2025). Only PhD students are eligible. See below for further details.

About being on MIST Council

If you would like to find out more about being on Council and what it can involve, please feel free to email any of us (email contacts below) with any of your informal enquiries! You can also find out more about MIST activities at mist.ac.uk. Two of our outgoing councillors, Beatriz and Sophie, have summarised their experiences being on MIST Council below.

Beatriz Sanchez-Cano (MIST Councillor):

"Being part of the MIST council for the last 3 years has been a great experience personally and professionally, in which I had the opportunity to know better our community and gain a larger perspective of the matters that are important for the MIST science progress in the UK. During this time, I’ve participated in a number of activities and discussions, such as organising the monthly MIST seminars, Autumn MIST meetings, writing A&G articles, and more importantly, being there to support and advise our colleagues in cases of need together with the wonderful council members. MIST is a vibrant and growing community, and the council is a faithful reflection of it."

Sophie Maguire (MIST Student Representative):

"Being the student representative for MIST council has been an amazing experience. I have been part of organizing conferences, chairing sessions, and writing grant applications based on the feedback MIST has received. From a wider perspective, MIST has helped to grow and support my professional networks which in turn, directly benefits my PhD work as well. I would encourage any PhD student to apply for the role of MIST Student Representative and I would be happy to answer any questions or queries you have about the role."

How to nominate

If you would like to stand for election or you are nominating someone else (with their agreement!) please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by Friday 31 May. If there is a surplus of nominations for a role, then an online vote will be carried out with the community. Please include the following details in the nomination:

  1. Name
  2. Position (Councillor/Student Rep.)
  3. Nomination Statement (150 words max including a bit about the nominee and focusing on your reasons for nominating. This will be circulated to the community in the event of a vote.)

MIST Council details

  • Sophie Maguire, University of Birmingham, Earth's ionosphere - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Georgios Nicolaou, MSSL, solar wind plasma - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, University of Leicester, Mars plasma - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Jasmine Kaur Sandhu, University of Leicester, Earth’s inner magnetosphere - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Andy Smith, Northumbria University, Space Weather - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Maria-Theresia Walach, Lancaster University, Earth’s ionosphere - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Emma Woodfield, British Antarctic Survey, radiation belts - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • MIST Council email - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Winners of Rishbeth Prizes 2023

We are pleased to announce that following Spring MIST 2023 the Rishbeth Prizes this year are awarded to Sophie Maguire (University of Birmingham) and Rachel Black (University of Exeter).

Sophie wins the prize for the best MIST student talk which was entitled “Large-scale plasma structures and scintillation in the high-latitude ionosphere”. Rachel wins the best MIST poster prize, for a poster entitled “Investigating different methods of chorus wave identification within the radiation belts”. Congratulations to both Sophie and Rachel!

As prize winners, Sophie and Rachel will be invited to write articles for Astronomy & Geophysics, which we look forward to reading.

MIST Council extends their thanks to the University of Birmingham for hosting the Spring MIST meeting 2023, and to the Royal Astronomical Society for their generous and continued support of the Rishbeth Prizes.

Nominations for MIST Council

We are pleased to open nominations for MIST Council. There are two positions available (detailed below), and elected candidates would join Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, Jasmine Kaur Sandhu, Andy Smith, Maria-Theresia Walach, and Emma Woodfield on Council. The nomination deadline is Friday 26 May.

Council positions open for nomination

  • MIST Councillor - a three year term (2023 - 2026). Everyone is eligible.
  • MIST Student Representative - a one year term (2023 - 2024). Only PhD students are eligible. See below for further details.

About being on MIST Council


If you would like to find out more about being on Council and what it can involve, please feel free to email any of us (email contacts below) with any of your informal enquiries! You can also find out more about MIST activities at mist.ac.uk.

Rosie Hodnett (current MIST Student Representative) has summarised their experience on MIST Council below:
"I have really enjoyed being the PhD representative on the MIST council and would like to encourage other PhD students to nominate themselves for the position. Some of the activities that I have been involved in include leading the organisation of Autumn MIST, leading the online seminar series and I have had the opportunity to chair sessions at conferences. These are examples of what you could expect to take part in whilst being on MIST council, but the council will welcome any other ideas you have. If anyone has any questions, please email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..”

How to nominate

If you would like to stand for election or you are nominating someone else (with their agreement!) please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by Friday 26 May. If there is a surplus of nominations for a role, then an online vote will be carried out with the community. Please include the following details in the nomination:
  • Name
  • Position (Councillor/Student Rep.)
  • Nomination Statement (150 words max including a bit about the nominee and your reasons for nominating. This will be circulated to the community in the event of a vote.)
 
MIST Council contact details

Rosie Hodnett - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Mathew Owens - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Beatriz Sanchez-Cano - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Jasmine Kaur Sandhu - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Andy Smith - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Maria-Theresia Walach - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Emma Woodfield - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
MIST Council email - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

RAS Awards

The Royal Astronomical Society announced their award recipients last week, and MIST Council would like to congratulate all that received an award. In particular, we would like to highlight the following members of the MIST Community, whose work has been recognised:
  • Professor Nick Achilleos (University College London) - Chapman Medal
  • Dr Oliver Allanson (University of Birmingham) - Fowler Award
  • Dr Ravindra Desai (University of Warwick) - Winton Award & RAS Higher Education Award
  • Professor Marina Galand (Imperial College London) - James Dungey Lecture

MIST online seminars

Upcoming Seminars

Tuesday 14 January 2025 | 11 - 12 GMT

Sarah Bentley (Northumbria University) 

Title:

How do fundamental modelling choices affect radial diffusion in Earth’s Radiation Belts?

Abstract:  

Earth’s radiation belts contain high energy, geomagnetically trapped charged particles that are responsible for several space weather hazards. Using conserved quantities associated with the motion of these particles, the radiation belts can be modelled through a basic diffusion equation. On longer timescales, this can be approximated as simply a 1d diffusion equation, representing the changing drift orbit of the electrons as they interact with electromagnetic fields.

Ensemble modelling - running a model many times to represent variations in the underlying physics - is increasingly being adopted by the space physics community to capture the uncertainty, which can be inherent to the system or due to observations or models. But before we can interpret the physics from an ensemble, we must understand what variation arises solely from the modelling method. We investigate the role of fundamental model choices to the evolution of the system, including the details of an initial enhancement, the location of the plasmapause and the outer boundary size and condition.

Our first key result suggests that because the amount of diffusion changes depending on where you are in the modelling domain, the size of the domain affects the way the system evolves. Both the location of the outer boundary, and the numerical condition used there, change the way in which the system evolves, raising questions about operational choices today. The second result we will highlight allows us to quantify how model components contribute to the evolution of the system. Surprisingly, we find that the gradient of the phase space density (PSD) contributes more to the evolution of the system than the diffusion coefficient DLL​. This contradicts our current understanding and has consequences whether correct or incorrect.

Past Seminars

Previous MIST online seminars are recorded and available on the  MIST YouTube channel .

Links to individual seminars are in the table below.

Date

Speaker

Title (Click for Link to Seminar)

03 December 2024

Tim Horbury (Imperial College London)

The IMAP mission: overview and prospects for science and space weather

04 November 2024

John Plane (School of Chemistry, University of Leeds) 

Effects of Cosmic Dust in the Atmospheres of Earth and Venus

01 October 2024

Jesse Coburn (MSSL, UCL)

Velocity-space methods for spacecraft observations

03 September 2024

Rosie Johnson (Aberystwyth University)

Jupiter's polar ionospheric flows

06 August 2024

Alina Bendt

(University of Warwick)

The phenomenology of wave-packets and coherent structures across the turbulent cascade in the solar wind as seen by Solar Orbiter

06 August 2024

Ruoyan Wang

(University of Leicester)

Probing the Jovian Ionosphere and Thermosphere via K-band Infrared Spectroscopy

04 June 2024 

Rebecca Smethurst

(University of Oxford)

“Tricking” social media recommendation algorithms to engage the “unreachable” with astrophysics

07 May 2024

Andrew Wright

(University of St Andrews)

Observations and Simulations of 3D Field Line Resonances in the Earth's Magnetosphere

16 April 2024

Christian Lao

(MSSL, UCL)

On the issues of identifying substorm onsets

 05 March 2024

Sophia Zomerdijk-Russell

(Imperial College London)

Investigating Magnetospheric Dynamics Driven by the Solar Wind at Mercury

05 March 2024

Patrik Krcelic

(University of Southampton)

The electrodynamics of fine scale aurora and associated Joule heating 

06 Feb 2024

Heli Hietala

(Queen Mary University London)

Shock generated transient structures in Solar System environments

16 Jan 2024

Jonny Rae

(Northumbria University)

International Cooperation and the European Heliospheric Community

05 Dec 2023

Suzie Imber

(University of Leicester)

Mercury's Dynamic Magnetosphere

07 Nov 2023

Catherine Regan

(MSSL, UCL)

The influence of dust on Mars' magnetosphere

07 Nov 2023

Samuel Fielding

(University of Edinburgh)

Space Weather: trying to improve ground level magnetic field perturbation prediction

03 Oct 2023

John Plane

(University of Leeds)

Cosmic dust in the atmospheres of Earth and Mars

05 Sep 2023

Andrea Larosa

(QMUL)

The relation between magnetic switchbacks and turbulence in the inner heliosphere

01 Aug 2023

Sheila Kanani

(Royal Astronomical Society)

EDI at the Royal Astronomical Society

11 Jul 2023

Harriet Turner

(University of Reading)

Solar wind data assimilation in an operational context

11 Jul 2023

Cameron Patterson 

(Lancaster University)

Can space weather delay your train… or worse?

06 Jun 2023

Charlotte Goetz

(Northumbria University)

The Magnetic Field of a Comet

02 May 2023

Mark Lester

(University of Leicester)

Sounding the Martian Ionosphere: New Insights from Mars Express and other satellites at Mars

07 Mar 2023

Audrey Schillings

(University of Leicester)

Strong variations in the Earth’s magnetic field (dB/dt spikes) possibly associated with sub-auroral polarizations streams (SAPS)

17 Feb 2023

Alexandra Fogg 

(Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)

Investigating the effects of solar wind pressure pulses on the terrestrial magnetosphere

01 Nov 2022

Ingrid Cnossen

(British Antarctic Survey)

Climate of the upper atmosphere: Long-term change and North-South asymmetries

04 Oct 2022

Alan Wood

(University of Birmingham)

Ionospheric structures and their drivers observed with the International LOFAR Telescope and the ESA Swarm mission

06 Sept 2022

Andrew Kavanagh

(British Antarctic Survey)

Simultaneous multi-scale measurements of Ion Drift in the Earth's Auroral Ionosphere

07 June 2022

Maria-Theresia Walach

(Lancaster University)

Ionospheric Electrodynamics at Earth

03 May 2022

Chris Owen

(MSSL/UCL)

Solar Orbiter – Progress to date and prospects going forward.

05 April 2022

Henrik Melin

(University of Leicester)

Aeronomy of the giant planets from over 30 years of H3+ observations

01 February 2022

Daniel Whiter

(University of Southampton)

Neutral heating by auroral electrodynamics

07 December 2021

Adam Masters

(Imperial College London)

A More Viscous-Like Solar Wind Interaction With All the Giant Planets

02 November 2021

Sandra Chapman

(University of Warwick)

‘Data analytics’ approaches to space weather in space and time

05 October 2021

Laura Berčič

(Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL)

Physical mechanisms related to the sunward electron deficit in the solar wind

07 September 2021

Beatriz Sánchez-Cano

(University of Leicester)

Mars’ Space Weather: the role of the ionosphere for (near) unmagnetised planets 

06 July 2021

Graziella Branduardi-Raymont

(University College London)

 

 

Soft X-ray imaging of geospace with SMILE

01 June 2021

Julia Stawarz

(Imperial College London)

Turbulence and Magnetic Reconnection in Space Plasmas: Insights from the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission

04 May 2021

Emma E. Woodfield

(British Antarctic Survey)

From Van Allen to Juno: Radiation Belts of the Solar System

13 April 2021

David Themens

(University of Birmingham)

Data first, physics later: How user needs have framed the development of E-CHAIM

02 March 2021

Martin Archer

(Imperial College London)

Researchers and public engagement: What role should I play to make a real difference?

02 February 2021

Luke Barnard

(University of Reading)

Coronal Mass Ejection modelling and prediction with Heliospheric Imagers

12 January 2021

Gabrielle Provan

(University of Leicester)

Magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling at Saturn and Jupiter in the era of Juno and Cassini

01 December 2020

Mike Lockwood

(University of Reading)

Semi-annual and Universal Time variations in the magnetosphere

03 November 2020

Clare Watt

(Northumbria University)

Earth's outer radiation belt: From microscale to macroscale

06 October 2020

Imogen Gingell

(University of Southampton)

Earth’s Bow Shock: A Laboratory for Kinetic Plasma Physics

01 September 2020

Caitriona Jackman

(Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)

Solar wind influence at the gas giant planets

04 August 2020

Jim Wild

(Lancaster University)

Space weather: living with our star

14 July 2020

Daniel Verscharen

(Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL)

Kinetic physics, collisions, and turbulence in the solar wind: a multi-scale perspective