Category: Conferences

Conferences, workshops, meetings, summer schools

COSPAR ISWAT Inaugural Working Meeting – Save the Date Announcement – 10-14 February 2020

The inaugural working meeting of the COSPAR International Space Weather Action Teams (ISWAT) will be held 10-14 February 2020 at the Radisson Resort, Port Canaveral, Florida, USA. Information about the ISWAT initiative is available at: https://iswat-cospar.org/. This meeting also comes inside the current launch window of the Solar Orbiter spacecraft from nearby Cape Canaveral.

ISWAT consists of Teams that focus on a variety of key problems and topics in space weather research and forecasting. The Teams are organised into Clusters (by domain, phenomena, impact, or overarching activities), to facilitate collaboration and ensure complementarity. On the website you can register a new Team (and in the near future, request to join existing teams). Team registration is open to all established and newly-formed teams focused on different aspects of space weather.

The COSPAR ISWAT initiative is built upon its precursor – the International Forum on Space Weather Capabilities Assessment (https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/assessment/) initiated during the 2017 International CCMC – LWS Working Meeting: “Assessing Space Weather Understanding and Applications” (https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/CCMC-LWS_Meeting/). The progress of Forum working teams is highlighted in the AGU Space Weather Journal special issue: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1002/(ISSN)1542-7390.SW_CASS. Active Forum Teams are anticipated to register into ISWAT and to participate in the February 2020 ISWAT Meeting. Success of the working meeting and the ISWAT initiative depends on active involvement of team leads, cluster moderators, and participants in meeting preparation and all follow-on activities.

The 10-14 February 2020 ISWAT meeting ( https://www.iswat-cospar.org/wm2020 ) will:
Allow Teams and Clusters to meet to establish their respective goals and plans;

Consolidate existing Teams, foster new Teams, and form a platform for the overarching activities and for the Teams to work together within and across Clusters;

Facilitate establishment of multi-disciplinary space weather community by bringing together experts in space weather phenomena and space environment impacts, model and application developers, data providers and forecasters.

Allow us to understand the needs of the user communities and space weather impacts, and to set targets for scientists and Teams to address;

Allow us to understand and assess constituent data and models;

Expand on-going community-wide research projects and jump-start new campaigns;

Set the stage for ISWAT’s future, understand how Teams and Clusters must interact in order to achieve long-term objectives; and

Develop approach to updating the COSPAR global space weather roadmap into a living document.

Registration information will be posted on the website by early October 2019 at the latest, followed by a preliminary schedule by the end of October 2019. We envisage around 100-150 participants and have 10 breakout rooms available at the venue. Everyone is welcome to join ISWAT and to attend the meeting – and to come to the meeting with a view to joining one or more existing Teams if you haven’t already done so in advance.

https://www.iswat-cospar.org/wm2020continue to the full article

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RAS specialist discussion meeting on high precision photometry for exoplanet and time domain astronomy

Dear all

We are organising a Royal Astronomical Society Specialist Discussion meeting on the 8 November 2019 on high precision photometry for exoplanet and time domain astronomy (https://ras.ac.uk/events-and-meetings/ras-meetings/high-precision-photometry-exoplanet-and-time-domain-astronomy ).

The UK has led the world in the use of high precision time-series photometry to detect transiting planets, first with the WASP survey and ULTRACAM and more recently with NGTS and HiPERCAM. These facilities have opened a new window in exoplanet detection and characterisation, together with a wide range of time-domain phenomena. From space, the Kepler and TESS satellites have revolutionised the world of exoplanet detection, with the ability to detect Neptune to Earth-sized planets. Both NGTS and TESS are observing at longer wavelengths than their predecessors, focusing on characterising Neptune and Earth-sized exoplanets around stars cooler than the sun. As they do, these facilities are observing millions of stars and are also discovering giant planets, eclipsing binaries, variable stars, pulsating white dwarfs, and many more unusual systems. They also probe stellar activity (e.g. flares) over a broad range of timescales. These precision photometric observations are an invaluable resource for the astronomical community, providing months of high-cadence monitoring data that would be nigh-on impossible to obtain via open time on International observing facilities. They are also an excellent preparation for future facilities such as PLATO.

This RAS specialist discussion meeting will bring together the UK community in order to share results from these new surveys, to discuss the synergies between NGTS and TESS, and to explore new instrumentation (e.g. Speculoos, HiPERCAM, CHEOPS) that the UK community will exploit in the years to come. We will end the meeting with a community discussion and a live demonstration of how to access NGTS data via the public archive hosted by ESO.
We invite you to submit an abstract by email to slc25@le.ac.uk The deadline for abstract submission is Friday 4 October 2019. We particularly encourage abstracts from PhD students and early career scientists and will strive to host a meeting with a diverse range of speakers.

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.… continue to the full article

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Knowledge Exchange Showcase – 5th November 2019

Knowledge Exchange Showcase – 5th November 2019

STFC offers a diverse portfolio of knowledge exchange schemes, designed to facilitate the transfer of STFC funded science and technology into commercial applications.

This event held at the Royal College of Physicians, London, NW1 4LE will highlight the opportunities available to potential applicants, and provide a platform for delegates from across the STFC community, companies and potential users/government agencies to network and form potential partnerships. Across the 2020 KE schemes, up to £4M in total is available to fund a number of projects spread over two KE calls and the Challenge Led Applied System Programme (CLASP) call. Please visit https://stfc.ukri.org/funding/stfc-knowledge-exchange/ for more information.

As well information on how to apply for this funding, there will be talks from previous recipients of both schemes and advice and tips on making applications from the Chairs of both the IPS and CLASP Panels. Applicants from industry will have the opportunity to hold a stand showcasing their products/expertise, to help identify their potential as project partners.

The CLASP challenge areas for 2019/20 will be Security and Environment, (please see the website for some example themes). To aid in the development of applications, representatives from various government agencies will highlight some of the relevant challenges in their sector. Throughout the day, there will be networking opportunities for applicants to meet and share ideas with potential project partners.

For more detail and to register, please click here… continue to the full article

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