MIST

Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial

Latest news

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

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.

SSAP roadmap update

The STFC Solar System Advisory Panel (SSAP) is undertaking a review of the "Roadmap for Solar System Research", to be presented to STFC Science Board later this year. This is expected to be a substantial update of the Roadmap, as the last full review was carried out in 2012, with a light-touch update in 2015.

The current version of the SSAP Roadmap can be found here.

In carrying out this review, we will take into account changes in the international landscape, and advances in instrumentation, technology, theory, and modelling work. 

As such, we solicit your input and comments on the existing roadmap and any material we should consider in this revision. This consultation will close on Wednesday 14 July 2021 and SSAP will try to give a preliminary assessment of findings at NAM.

This consultation is seeking the view of all members of our community and we particularly encourage early career researchers to respond. Specifically, we invite:

Comments and input on the current "Roadmap for Solar System Research" via the survey by clicking here.

Short "white papers" on science investigations (including space missions, ground-based experimental facilities, or computing infrastructure) and impact and knowledge exchange (e.g. societal and community impact, technology development). Please use the pro-forma sent to the MIST mailing list and send your response to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Quo vadis interim board

 

A white paper called "Quo vadis, European space weather community" has been published in J. Space Weather Space Clim. which outlines plans for the creation of an organisation to represent the European space weather community.
Since it was published, an online event of the same name was organised on 17 March 2021. A “Quo Vadis Interim Board” was then set up, to establish a mechanism for this discussion, which will go on until June 21st.

The Interim Board is composed of volunteers from the community in Europe. Its role is to coordinate the efforts so that the space weather (and including space climate) European community can:

  1. Organise itself
  2. Elect people to represent them

To reach this goal, the Interim Board is inviting anyone interested in and outside Europe to join the “Quo Vadis European Space Weather Community ” discussion forum.

Eligible European Space Weather Community members should register to the “Electoral Census” to be able to vote in June for the final choice of organisation.

This effort will be achieved through different actions indicated on the Quo Vadis webpage and special Slack workspace.

LOFAR Observations of sub-structure within a Travelling Ionospheric Disturbance at mid-latitude

By Gareth Dorrian (Space Environment & Radio Engineering, University of Birmingham)

Travelling ionospheric disturbances (TID) are ubiquitous wave-like propagations in the Earth’s ionosphere and are the ionospheric counterpart of neutral atmospheric gravity waves (AGW). AGW can be driven by numerous sources from both the terrestrial and space weather domain such as sunrise, auroral sub-storms, volcanic eruptions, or thunderstorms. Terrestrial drivers from the lower atmosphere are coupled to the thermosphere by upwards propagation of AGW (Hines, 1960).

We study the ionosphere using LOFAR observations of trans-ionospheric radio propagation from compact natural radio sources. This is advantageous as, unlike most artificial satellites, natural radio sources are inherently broadband emitters and LOFAR is a broadband receiver with high frequency and time resolution. The behaviour of radio scattering through the ionosphere can thus be observed simultaneously across many frequencies. 

Observations using the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR: van Haarlem et al., 2013) of trans-ionospheric radio propagation through a TID over the UK were made on 7 January 2019 (Figure 1). In LOFAR data, ionospheric variability manifests as rapid changes in the received signal from the radio source. Using this technique, internal sub-structure within the TID were clearly identified with dominant modes of oscillation on timescales of ~300s. At the observing geometries used these oscillations equated to sub-structure scale sizes of ~20 km. Contemporary GNSS and ionosonde data were used to provide the global parameters of the TID. At the observation frequencies used (25-65 MHz) the Fresnel scale is between 3-4 km; consequently the majority of the scattering features observed were lens-like refractions, rather than diffractive scintillation. Geomagnetic conditions at this time were very quiet, suggesting a terrestrial driver.

 


Figure 1: Left panels: LOFAR dynamic spectra from UK and Irish stations showing rapid variations in received signal power across the full observing band, caused by passage of TID internal substructure across raypath. Right panels: GNSS plasma anomaly maps from the observing period with the wave-like form of the TID clearly visible over the UK.

Original article for further details: 

Dorrian, G., Fallows, R., Wood, A., Themens, D. R., Boyde, B., Krankowski, A., et al. (2023). LOFAR observations of substructure within a travelling ionospheric disturbance at mid-latitude. Space Weather, 21, e2022SW003198. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022SW003198

 

References:

van Haarlem, M. P., Wise, M. W., Gunst, A. W., Heald, G., McKean, J. P., Hessels, J. W. T., et al. (2013). LOFAR: Low-frequency-array. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 556, A2. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201220873

Hines, C. O. (1960). Internal atmospheric gravity waves at ionospheric heights. Canadian Journal of Physics, 38(11), 1441– 1481. https://doi.org/10.1139/p60-150