MIST

Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial

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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
Full details can be found here: https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/royal-astronomical-society-unveils-2023-award-winners.

New MIST Council 2021-

There have been some recent ingoings and outgoings at MIST Council - please see below our current composition!:

  • Oliver Allanson, Exeter (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2024 -- Chair
  • Beatriz Sánchez-Cano, Leicester (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2024
  • Mathew Owens, Reading (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2023
  • Jasmine Sandhu, Northumbria (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2023 -- Vice-Chair
  • Maria-Theresia Walach, Lancaster (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2022
  • Sarah Badman, Lancaster (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2022
    (co-opted in 2021 in lieu of outgoing councillor Greg Hunt)

Charter amendment and MIST Council elections open

Nominations for MIST Council open today and run through to 8 August 2021! Please feel free to put yourself forward for election – the voting will open shortly after the deadline and run through to the end of August. The positions available are:

  • 2 members of MIST Council
  • 1 student representative (pending the amendment below passing)

Please email nominations to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 8 August 2021. Thank you!

Charter amendment

We also move to amend the following articles of the MIST Charter as demonstrated below. Bold type indicates additions and struck text indicates deletions. Please respond to the email on the MIST mailing list before 8 August 2021 if you would like to object to the amendment; MIST Charter provides that it will pass if less than 10% of the mailing list opposes its passing. 

4.1  MIST council is the collective term for the officers of MIST and consists of six individuals and one student representative from the MIST community.

5.1 Members of MIST council serve terms of three years, except for the student representative who serves a term of one year.

5.2 Elections will be announced at the Spring MIST meeting and voting must begin within two months of the Spring MIST meeting. Two slots on MIST council will be open in a given normal election year, alongside the student representative.

5.10 Candidates for student representative must not have submitted their PhD thesis at the time that nominations close.

Variation of Geomagnetic Index Empirical Distribution and Burst Statistics Across Successive Solar Cycles

By Aisling Bergin (University of Warwick)

Geomagnetic indices, based on magnetic field observations at the Earth's surface, provide almost continuous monitoring of Earth’s magnetospheric and ionospheric activity. We analyze two geomagnetic index time series, AE and SMR, which track activity in the auroral region and around the Earth's equator, respectively. We show here that quantiles of the index distributions track solar cycle variation over solar cycles 21–24. The question is then how the likelihood of events varies with solar cycle activity.

In this paper, events are defined as bursts or excursions above a threshold which is either (i) a fixed value or (ii) a quantile of the distribution of the observed index values. We study the solar cycle dependence of the distributions of the burst return periods, R, and the burst durations, τ. A result from the theory of level crossings (LC) [1] constrains how , the ratio of the mean burst duration to return period, depends on the underlying empirical distribution of the observed quantity.

Our main results are as follows:

  1. At fixed value burst thresholds, is peaked in the declining phase for AE annual samples and follows the sunspot number double peak for SMR.
  2. Bursts are identified in samples at three distinct phases of the solar cycle. At fixed quantile thresholds the distributions of τ and R fall on single empirical curves for each of (i) the AE index at solar minimum, maximum, and declining phase and (ii) the SMR index at solar maximum. This goes beyond the constraint on average from LC theory.
  3. The tail of the empirical cumulative distribution functions of the observed values of the AE and SMR indices collapse onto common functional forms specific to each index and cycle phase when normalized to the first two moments of their exceedance distributions.

Taken together, these results may combine to offer important constraints in the quantification of overall space weather activity levels.

 

Three panels showing how the theory of level crossings relates the empirical cumulative distribution function (cdf) to the ratio of the mean duration to mean return period for bursts above a specified threshold in a timeseries.
The theory of level crossings relates the empirical cumulative distribution function (cdf) to the ratio of the mean duration to mean return period for bursts above a specified threshold in a timeseries. Panels (a) - (c) illustrate this relationship for the SuperMAG 1-min ring current index (SMR) from 1975 to 2017. (a) Cdf values, C(x), and highlighted quantiles of interest (black lines) for nonoverlapping 1-year (-)SMR samples are seen to track the 13-month smoothed monthly sunspot number (red, shifted). (b) Bursts (grey) are identified where the SMR index (black) is below a given threshold, u (blue). Burst parameters duration (τ) and return period (R) are quantified. (c) The ratio of mean burst duration to mean return period for bursts in nonoverlapping 1-year (-)SMR samples over thresholds of 40 nT (purple), 60 nT (blue), and 100 nT (green) follows the sunspot number double peak (grey).

Please see the paper for full details: Bergin, A., Chapman, S. C., Moloney, N. R., & Watkins, N. W. (2022). Variation of geomagnetic index empirical distribution and burst statistics across successive solar cycles. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 127, e2021JA029986. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JA029986

[1] Lawrance, A., & Kottegoda, N. (1977). Stochastic modelling of riverflow time series. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, 140(1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/2344516