Contributions are invited to the upcoming RAS Specialist Discussion, “Cometary science with Rosetta: Striking, timely, and more to come” which will be taking place on the 13 December 2019 at the RAS in London. More details can be found on the RAS website. If you would like to present your work, send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by Friday 15 November 2019 with a title, a short abstract, and whether you prefer an oral or poster presentation. Contributions from PhD students and early career scientists are particularly encouraged.
The invited presentations are:
The abstract for the meeting is as follows:
The Rosetta mission was the first mission to escort a comet, a possibility to witness the evolution of the coma and the nucleus as it approached perihelion and departed from it. This dataset has been complemented by the measurements from the Philae lander, first probe to land on a cometary nucleus (November 2014), and by Earth-based observations. This RAS Specialist Discussion Meeting will highlight the great scientific advancement in cometary science which Rosetta has brought. It is extremely timely as the official post-operations period of the mission ended recently (September 2019) and a consolidated and enhanced dataset is becoming available to the scientific community via the ESA Planetary Science Archive (PSA). Finally, the Meeting will offer us a forum for highlighting and exploring new directions after Rosetta, including the recently-selected ESA “Comet Interceptor” mission.
Full programme to be available early December on the RAS website. The meeting will open at 10 am with the first presentation at 10:30 am.
Admission to Specialist Discussion Meetings is free for RAS Fellows, £15 for non-fellows (£5 for students), cash or cheque only, collected at the registration desk. Admission to the subsequent Open (Monthly A&G) Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society is open to all, at no charge.
The Python in Heliophysics Community (PyHC) Fall 2019 meeting will take place at LASP in Boulder, Colorado, over 4–6 November 2019. This meeting focuses on delving further into topics brought up in the Spring 2019 meeting, as well as considering several other relevant themes brought up since said meeting. We will be revisiting PyHC governance and standards, discussing funding opportunities for PyHC and PyHC community members' funded projects, and discussing and working in tandem on various other topics deemed important by the PyHC group. The meeting will generate a report with findings and recommendations that will be presented to the community.
The first two days (Monday and Tuesday) are full days, whereas the last day (Wednesday) is a half day. All days will have coffee/snacks provided, while full days will also feature catered lunches. For more information and to register, visit the conference website.
Autumn MIST will be held at the Royal Astronomical Society, Burlington House, London, on Friday 29 November 2019. The meeting will commence at 10:30, with registration from 10:00 onwards, and will include a poster session, lightning talks, and oral sessions.
Abstracts
Contributions are welcome from all areas of MIST science. We will not have a theme this year, and we would like to instead celebrate the broad variety of science in the MIST community. Professor Mathew Owens (University of Reading) will be giving an invited talk as follows
“Sun to mud: The challenges of forecasting within the coupled space-weather system."
Forecasting space weather with a lead time of more than an hour requires propagation of information through the whole Sun-Earth system. Changes in the dominant physical processes, as well as the characteristic spatial and temporal scales, means this is best achieved using separate models for each physical domain (e.g., the photosphere, corona, heliosphere, magnetosphere, ionosphere, etc). The fundamental sources of uncertainty and available observational constraints differ greatly across these models, meaning coupling them presents a wealth of scientific and engineering challenges.
Abstracts should be submitted by completing this form by the end of Friday 18 October.
Lightning Talks
This year we are also accepting lightning talk submissions, which can be submitted in addition to abstracts. Lightning talks are short (up to 2 minutes) with a maximum of 1 presentation slide. This format is ideal for presenting datasets, upcoming missions, analysis techniques, or public engagement projects that would be of interest to the MIST community. We emphasise that lightning talks should not be a poster advert.
Lightning talks should be submitted by completing this form by the end of Friday 18 October.
Registration fee
Due to the venue hire it is necessary to charge a registration fee of £20, or £10 for students. We will provide receipts, to allow you to claim with the rest of your travel expenses, but please make sure you bring the registration fee in cash on the day.
Although the meeting will start at 10:30, we will have access to the building from 10:00. Tea and coffee will be provided during the afternoon poster session.
A RAS Specialist Discussion Meeting on the topic of “Radiation belt modelling in the post Van Allen Probes era” will be held on Friday 10th January 2020 at the Royal Astronomical Society, Burlington House. This meeting will include keynote talks from Lauren Blum (NASA GSFC), Ewan Haggerty (Airbus Space and Defense), and Yuri Shprits (UCLA & GFZ Potsdam). Further details can be found on the RAS website.
Abstracts can be submitted through a Google Form. The deadline for abstract submission is 4 October 2019.
RAS discussion meetings can provide a slightly different forum to that of a standard scientific meeting. It may be beneficial to particularly consider the "discussion" aspect of the meeting when submitting an abstract, i.e. open questions and future challenges, hypotheses, possible collaborations, negative results etc. Therefore, in addition to "standard" abstracts, we particularly welcome talk, poster and lightning talk abstracts that are specifically aimed at generating discussion.
Admission to Specialist Discussion Meetings is free for RAS Fellows, £15 for non-fellows (£5 for students), cash or cheque only, collected at the registration desk. Admission to the subsequent Open (Monthly A&G) Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society is open to all, at no charge.
A Lorentz Center @ Snellius Workshop will take place in Leiden, Netherlands, between 2–6 September 2019, with the aim of making concrete steps towards improving space weather forecasts by implementing ensemble techniques. Researchers from academia, operations, and industry across all space weather disciplines will learn from experts in terrestrial weather forecasting and discuss next steps. The workshop is convened by Eelco Doornbos, Jordan Guerra, and Sophie Murray.
There are limited workshop spaces still available, therefore the co-convenors invite applications to attend the workshop. Please register your interest before 12th July via the workshop page on the Lorentz Center website, where you will also find more information. Note that there is no registration fee to attend, and some limited travel support may also be available (please indicate if this is needed in your application).
Ensemble techniques, which use a set of predictions to improve on a single-model output, have been very successful in improving operational weather forecasting and are also used in many other fields such as data science and economics. Their use in space weather forecasting could not only improve forecast accuracy but also provide simple model uncertainties that are crucial for improving end-user understanding of the products available. The main goal of this workshop is to make concrete steps towards improving the SW forecasting capabilities by implementing ensemble techniques that have been successful in other forecasting fields, especially terrestrial weather.