We solicit manuscripts on this general subject for inclusion in a Topical Collection of Solar Physics. The deadline for submission of statements of interest (SOI) with a tentative title, abstract, author list, and three suggestions for referees (preferably with e-mail) is 31 January 2024. The deadline for manuscript submission is 15 July 2024.

This Topical Collection was stimulated by the workshop “Future of Solar Modelling”, held in Sierre from 4 – 7 September 2023 (https://indico.cern.ch/event/1123061/overview). This collection is not a conference proceedings, and it is not limited to research presented at the conference. All submissions must be completed original papers that meet the regular quality of the Journal. The Topical Collection can start off with one or two invited reviews to summarise the subject and frame the work in the research papers which follow. Topics to be included are:
– Helioseismology
– Transport of chemicals in the Sun
– Solar chemical abundances and solar atmosphere models
– Radiative opacities and equation of state for the solar plasma
– Solar internal rotation and transport of angular momentum
– Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the Sun
– Solar neutrinos
– Solar evolution and calibration of solar models

Please consult recent Topical Collections in Solar Physics. For further information, and submission of statements of interest, please contact the Editor-in-Chief Iñigo Arregui .

Iñigo Arregui (Solar Physics Editor), Gaël Buldgen, Jérôme Bétrisey, and Devesh Nandal (Guest Editors)… continue to the full article

Read more

Dear Colleagues,

Please see the email below (and attachment) regarding UKRI’s planning for next generation exascale supercomputing systems and services. STFC is seeking feedback regarding the attached draft document (STFC Exascale Requirements). As well as individual inputs, we would like to submit a UKSP response.

If you would like to contribute to this, please email the UKSP chair (natasha.jeffrey@northumbria.ac.uk) or complete the short Google form (responses can be anonymous): https://forms.gle/GTkrTbBAF9WpUKuJ8

Since the deadline for responses is the 24th of January, please respond by the 22nd of January if possible so all responses can be collated.

We thank Robertus Erdelyi for bringing this to the attention of the council.

Kind regards,
UKSP Council

===
Dear Colleague,

If you make use of computing in your research, or expect to in the future, please read on. Feel free to pass this e-mail and the attached document to any colleagues for whom it might be relevant.

As part of UKRI’s planning for next generation exascale supercomputing systems and services, STFC established an Exascale Working Group which has been gathering feedback from the community about use cases and requirements.

We would very much appreciate your feedback on the attached draft STFC Exascale Requirements document. This summarises contributions received to date from major STFC projects, services and a number of allied domains which are supported by, or working with, STFC. We are circulating the draft as widely as possible as we want to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to comment on it.

We are particularly seeking feedback on the following:

• Are there any obvious gaps or omissions? e.g. projects that are at an early stage of development but will have major compute/data requirements.
• Are your project or community’s exascale requirements adequately captured? e.g. the timeline to exascale and level of resourcing required.
• Have we correctly synthesised the critical attributes and characteristics of STFC community workflows? e.g. the balance between monolithic and ensemble workflows, data volume and velocity, and homogeneity versus heterogeneity of systems and services.

If you are unsure whether your project or workflow would be considered “exascale”, the ExCALIBUR exascale pathfinder programme has produced a definition which may be helpful:

• Solving Problems that are 10-1000x larger than we solve at present
• Solving Problems 10-1000x faster than at present
• Problems can be simulation, data modelling and/or data-driven
• Can come from all areas of Research and Innovation
• Exascale “Velocity” is just as important an output as exascale “Volume”

“Should I respond to this consultation?” If your work is compute and data intensive but you do not feel that this definition applies to you, we would still encourage you to read and comment on the exascale requirements document so that your views can be captured. Your response will help to shape the future direction of the UK’s largest ever public investment in scientific computing facilities.

Please send your feedback to the special mailbox we have set up for the requirements gathering exercise: STFC_Exascale_WG@leicester.ac.uk.

Your comments should reach us by 5pm on 24th January 2024. After this time, we will incorporate feedback into a revised draft which will be circulated in February. In early March, STFC will be holding a Town Hall to discuss to the document and we hope that many of you will attend that event.

A note on privacy and data protection: We expect that the requirements document will become part of the public record once finalised. Your feedback and contributions will be anonymised by the working group and your identity will only be shared outside of the working group with your express written permission. Consultation responses will be deleted six months after the closing date.

Wishing you all a restful Christmas break and a very happy New Year.

Best wishes,
Mark Wilkinson
Jeremy Yates
Vassil Alexandrov
(Co-chairs of the STFC Exascale Working Group)
===… continue to the full article

Read more

Dear Colleagues,

2023 was the first round of the Astronomy Grants Panel Small Awards scheme, and at the end of the round I am writing to the community with some summary information, including applications received and support awarded, some statistical and procedural information, and issues arising. The full report can be find here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QlO44iVbjmH3vgNjGE0CkL4yvJt87gGY/view?usp=drive_link

Regards,
Lyndsay Fletcher

… continue to the full article

Read more

I wanted to bring to your attention the Topical Issue to be opened in Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate addressing the dynamics of slow and fast solar wind. We are collecting expression of intent by December 15th (Preliminary title and authors’ list). Please read the text below for all the details!

The Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate (JSWSC) plans to open a Topical Issue “Exploring the Origin, Evolution, and Interaction of Fast and Slow Solar Wind and their Significance for Space Weather.”

This Topical Issue (TI) addresses the dynamics of fast and slow solar wind. It aims at exploring their origin, evolution, and interaction, encompassing both their source regions and heliospheric signatures, and resulting space weather effects.

The TI grows out of the session CD-02 “All About the Solar Wind”, held at the European Space Weather Week 2023 in Toulouse. Contribution to this TI is, however, not limited to participants of the European Space Weather Week. The TI will be open to all submissions that fit its scope.

If you are interested in contributing to the TI, please, submit your Expression of Intent, including an initial title and preliminary author list, by 15 December 2023 via an informal e-mail to the Lead Topical Editor, Stephan G. Heinemann (stephan.heinemann@helsinki.fi). The deadline for submission of the full manuscript will be in summer 2024, but it has not yet been set.

The Editorial team includes:
– Stephan G. Heinemann (Topical Editor-in-Chief)
– Eleanna Asvestari (Topical Editor)
– Matt Owens (Topical Editor)
– Krzysztof Barczynski (Topical Editor)

For detailed information about the submission guidelines of the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate, please visit https://www.swsc-journal.org/.

Important Dates:
Expression of Intent Deadline: December 15th, 2023
Manuscript Submission Deadline: TBD (Summer 2024)

We value your support and kindly ask you to help us spread the word, by forwarding this information to persons whose research fits the scope of the TI and whom you think might be interested in submitting a contribution.… continue to the full article

Read more

The European Solar Physics Division (ESPD) of the European Physical Society (EPS) awards several prizes every year in recognition of the scientific excellence of European solar physicists and their service to the community:

– The ESPD Patricia Edwin PhD Thesis Prize will be awarded to a young researcher whose PhD thesis was defended in 2023.

– The ESPD Giancarlo Noci Early Career Prize will be awarded to a young researcher whose PhD degree was awarded after 01/01/2020 (with possible extension).

– The ESPD Zdenek Svetska Senior Prize will be awarded to a distinguished senior solar scientist for a life-long prolific career or scholarship in the field of solar physics.

These prizes are nomination-based. The deadline for nomination is February 4th, 2024.

Further information about eligibility, documents to be included in the nomination package, and submission process for each prize can be found on the ESPD prizes webpage: https://www.eps.org/members/group_content_view.asp?group=85203&id=641304

ESPD aspires to be an inclusive and welcoming environment for all who enjoy solar physics. In order to promote equality in science, ESPD strongly encourages the nomination of female and other under-represented categories in solar physicists.

The ESPD Prize Committee… continue to the full article

Read more

Dear all,

The sunpy developers present to you the latest release of sunpy, version 5.1. In this major release new features include:

– 🧲 New coordinate frames related to the Earth’s magnetic field (Geomagnetic, Solar Magnetic, and Geocentric Solar Magnetic).
– 🌶️ A new sub-module (sunpy.coordinates.spice) to do coordinate computations with SPICE kernels.
– 🥁 Support for GONG synoptic map data.
– 🤫 Improved support for WISPR data.
– 🌞 A new function to calculate the solar eclipse fraction at a given location and time.

There are also plenty of bug fixes, documentation improvements, and several removals of deprecated functionality.

The full what’s new can be found at https://docs.sunpy.org/en/stable/whatsnew/5.1.html, and the full changelog at https://docs.sunpy.org/en/stable/whatsnew/changelog.html.

To update you can run either:

– “pip install –upgrade sunpy” (for pip users)
– “conda update sunpy” (for conda users)

👏 Finally, we would like to give a shout out to new contributors to sunpy for this major release: Trestan Simon, Hannah Collier, Brett Graham, Kurt McKee, Paul Wright, Sam Van Kooten, and Sam Badman.

SunPy is a community powered project, and would not exist without continual input from contributors around the world!

David Stansby,
on behalf of the SunPy Developers… continue to the full article

Read more

Dear Colleagues,

As an outcome of the last (2023) UK Solar Instrumentation and Facilities Forum, it was decided that the community should consider and share future mission and project ideas to try to identify future UK priorities and strategies for the solar community. We have created a form for this task, and we ask the community to submit brief project concepts ranging from:

Technology and instruments
Mission ideas and proposals
Collaborative science ideas

The above can be shared via the form:
Solar Mission, Instrument, Technology and Collaboration Ideas Submission Form

The submissions will be used to create a database of solar technology, instrument, and mission ideas that will be maintained by the UKSP Council and shared with the community and STFC Solar System Advisory Panel. The information will also be used when organising the UK Solar Instrumentation and Facilities Forum.

The database can also be used to share collaborative science ideas, especially those suitable for the new STFC large awards. We hope this will encourage collaboration in our community and help to form ideas for large and successful solar projects.

The form is also available via the UKSP website:
https://www.uksolphys.org/planning-and-stratergy/uk-solar-instrumentation-and-facilities-forum-new/

Kind regards,
UKSP Council, Richard Harrison, Sarah Matthews, Jackie Davies… continue to the full article

Read more

Members of the RAS Council are elected by ballot, with the result announced at the Annual General Meeting in May 2024. You are now invited to submit nominations or consider having yourself nominated for the Council positions which will be available from May.

If you require a word.doc version of the nomination form please email membership@ras.ac.uk.

The RAS council roles:
Council Nominations 2024 including Letter from Professor Mark Lester
Elections to RAS Council 2024 – Council Position Roles
Elections to RAS Council 2024 – Nomination Form

Do please think seriously about participating in this important process as there are a number of roles up for nomination this year. If you have any questions you are welcome to contact me. Please send your completed nomination form to pdiamond@ras.ac.uk. The deadline is noon on Friday 24 November 2023.

 … continue to the full article

Read more

The UKSP Council wishes to draw your attention to upcoming award deadlines.

The forthcoming PhD prizes, in particular, have the potential to significantly impact the careers of early-career researchers. We encourage PhD supervisors to broadly consider the criteria and the accomplishments of their PhD students. Additionally, we urge early-career researchers who meet the award requirements to consult with their supervisors about the possibility of nomination.

PhD Prizes:·
European Physical Society Plasma Physics Division – 28th November 2023
PhD thesis must have been formally accepted by a degree-awarding institution in the EPS member states during the two years preceding the nomination http://plasma.ciemat.es/eps/awards/phd-research-award/

Royal Astronomical Society Keith Runcorn – 31st January 2024
Final thesis corrections need to have been approved by the awarding institution within the last year – e.g. between 31st January 2023 and 31st January 2024 for this year’s prize: https://ras.ac.uk/awards-and-grants/awards/2277-keith-runcorn-thesis-prize

—
Copernicus Society Copernicus Medal – 15th November 2023
Explicitly mid-career prize (no later than 20 years after receiving the PhD degree) for geo-, planetary- and space sciences: https://www.copernicus-gesellschaft.org/medal.html
—
Innovation Award:
European Physical Society Plasma Physics Division – 15th February 2024
For innovations which have had a real-world impact; interdisciplinary and teamwork is favourable: http://plasma.ciemat.es/eps/awards/innovation-award/… continue to the full article

Read more

In the UK, our solar community has been successful in including the European Solar Telescope (EST) as one of the high-priority future facilities in the recently published STFC Solar System Roadmap.

At the end of 2022, the Board of Directors (on which the UK sits) of EST voted to establish the EST Canarian Foundation as the interim legal figure for EST, with the goals of bringing on board the ministries and their representatives to work towards establishing an ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium).

Led by Sheffield, several groups in the UK including Aberystwyth, Durham, Exeter, Glasgow and QUB have made a commitment to form a UK Universities Consortium (UKUC), raised funds and on 25 July 2023 joined the Canarian Foundation for the next 2 years. Other UK institutions, e.g., UCL, have also indicated willingness and are now looking into opportunities to contribute. Further, UKUC has also successfully secured financial support from STFC to join the Canarian Foundation.

The UK currently supports developments of future benefit to EST, including participation in the TSI (Tuneable Imaging Spectropolarimeter) design, EST Data Centre design, and the development of a solar turbulence profiler and real-time control system that has applications to the adaptive optics implementations (MCAO – Multi-conjugate adaptive optics) for both DKIST and EST.

EST is an ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) project that has been designed by a consortium of 27 partners (from academia and industry) in 14 European countries. The UK community has been involved since the project began. EST will be polarimetrically compensated, and the first solar telescope to incorporate multi-conjugate adaptive optics from inception, enabling diffraction-limited observations at an unprecedented 25 km resolution, less than the photon scattering mean-free path in the photosphere. EST will provide the most sensitive diagnostics of the thermal, dynamic and magnetic properties of the plasma in the solar atmosphere, at the highest spatial resolution, and over the most scale heights available on any solar telescope, on the ground or in space. The use of beam splitters and integral field unit spectrographs will allow simultaneous high temporal resolution 2-D spectroscopy and spectropolarimetry at multiple heights in the solar atmosphere. This is currently unachievable with any other facility.

EST will also deliver an unprecedented level of data in solar physics, of the order of Pb/day, to be managed by the EST Data Centre (DC). Here, it is foreseen that the UK will have a major role in partnership with a few European institutions in the DC. Addressing the data handling will also enable various opportunities for UK industry.

Robertus Erdelyi, on behalf of EST-UKUC… continue to the full article

Read more