Thursday, June 27, 2013

The next BARREL/EFW telecom

Hi all,

I hope everyone has recovered from the last few meetings! Both GEM and our workshop with the EFW  were highly successful and very busy. Now having had a week to relax a bit I feel ready to get back to the grind of writing papers and doing research.

We will be starting our weekly telecoms back up on July 8th. The EFW telecoms will be starting back up the week before. If there are any volunteers to give a brief science talk or summary of what they did at or thought about the workshop or GEM let us know and we will add you to the speaker list. 


 
 
  

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Shout out in todays tutorial

This morning we again had two great tutorials one by Lynn Kistler on oxygen in the magnetosphere, and the other by Xinlin Li on the Colorado cube Sat mission. Xinlin gave BARREL a great shout out. A few of his students have been working closely with us looking at conjunctions between our balloons and their satellite.


They have had perhaps the most successful cubesat mission to date. In fact their satellite after having gone silent and thought to have ended back in March has just started sending data back down again. It really is the little mission that could. Hopefully it will have an amazingly long life and we will get even more conjunctions this next campaign. It is a long shot and we were incredibly lucky to have such great coverage this last year, but why not shoot for the Moon (or at least the radiation belts).


Good luck little REPTILE and we are excited about continuing our successful collaborations with you!


Wednesday, June 19, 2013

The first GEM poster session

We have had many great sessions so far and the week is only half way through. Last night was the first of two poster sessions and it was really cool to see how many students were looking at BARREL events.


Zan (from Dartmouth College) presented on EMIC waves and their ability to precipitate radiation belt electrons. She showed work from her upcoming paper as well as a bit on the Jan 17th event.  





Lauren (from LASP at CU Boulder) is part of a Cube Sat project which is able to look at relativistic precipitation. Lauren has been looking at conjunctions between REPTILE and BARREL when we both observe relativistic precipitation. 




Thiago (From Dartmouth College) is a modeler who has been looking at the 17th event. He will soon be graduating and will be moving out to LASP for his post doc, however we hope that he will continue to work with us on BARREL data!



Jan is a postdoc at Dartmouth who along with Thiago is looking at the Jan 17th event. We have some great results from this modeling effort and our data!





Sapna (Dartmouth College) is looking at POES data with our events. This should give some great results with collaborations not just with the Van Allen Probes, but also with REPTILE

And this is Robert from UNH who works with Cluster data. He hasn't yet started to work with BARREL as Cluster was in eclipse for most of our 2013 campaign, but this next year we have high hopes for collaborations between our two missions! 


Sunday, June 16, 2013

On our way to GEM

Got into Denver after a very early morning (4:30 am) and now heading on up the mountain and it looks a bit stormy.

The BARREL Grad students are all ready there and enjoying the day of tutorials. This afternoon Brett is giving the tutorial on the Van Allen probes. Leslie and I saw a preview of the talk and it was great, so try not to miss it!

I hope everyone has a safe trip up to Snowmass and we will see you soon.





Tuesday, June 11, 2013

GEM is less than a week away!

Now that we have had a few days to recover from the amazing EFW/BARREL workshop, we have to turn our attention to the GEM workshop in Snowmass CO.



Time enough to take a few of the ideas that were discussed in the workshop and get a couple results ready to show everyone who wasn't able to go to the workshop but will be at GEM. At GEM we'll also be able to show our data and Bdas (a library of IDL programs to read and analyse our data) in its full glory.

As there are quiet a few people who were at the workshop and will be going to GEM I hope we'll all get a chance to further the development of the possible papers which were discussed at the workshop! It's amazing how much work and new results can be found when working face to face. Skype and e-mail are great, but nothing beats sitting over lunch talking with people drawing ideas out on a napkin. I might have to go get myself a napkin notebook prior to the meeting, although I probably could just make my own.


Thursday, June 6, 2013

Last day of the workshop

Hi all,

Today is the last day of our workshop. It has been really great; lots of discussion, lots of plans made for future research, lots and lots of learning how to run workshop groups greater than 10 people. It was a great surprise to see how many people were interested not just in our data but also in working with us and collaborating on a few events.

Today is technically a half day, but there are rooms free in the afternoon for more break out meetings and most of the BARREL team will be around to have more focused discussions on individual events. Come find us if you are interested.


Safe travels and thanks to all who came!


Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Happy second day of the EFW/BARREL workshop

Happy second day of the workshop. We had a great and productive day yesterday. I think we had some great discussions about the Jan 17th storm and other possible time periods to look at for EMCI waves and relativistic precipitation. Hopefully today will be just as productive! 




Today is a great day for a workshop as it's rainy and cloudy out side. We have plenty of coffee, or at least coffee near by, projectors in many of these rooms, and blackboards. Everything we need to really start getting some great work done.  



We're starting out today with some great overview talks. After the review talks, we'll have our break out sessions like yesterday. It seems that our chaos to order model of organising the workshop is working incredibly well. 


Today I will be in the meeting discussing the Jan 26th event (the storm that had it all) as well as the Feb. 2nd events. According to the black board it looks like we'll have our poster session, a session on the the plasmasphere and a session on the radars. I believe there are still a couple of rooms free for others to meet if interested in other events/topics. 


Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Good Morning: Workshop day 1

Hi all,

It's great to see you all at the workshop, and if you are not here we're missing you. The schedule for the workshop is slowly coming together. Today, for me at least, is going to be a good day because I get to talk about my favourite type of waves, ElectroMagnetic Ion Cyclotron waves (EMIC) waves. I also get the chance to work with my undergraduate advisor Mark Engebretson which is always a treat. Anyone at the meeting is always welcome to join us.

Right after the short talk part of the day we will be showing how to access our data and how to plot it. If you can't make it to this session there are quiet a few of us around that can help out throughout the workshop. I'll try to put up updates as we go along.

Have a great day.


Monday, June 3, 2013

Workshop starts tomorrow.

Safe Travels for everyone coming to Minnesota for the workshop (all others traveling). It looks like it's going to be rainy and slightly cold throughout the workshop with highs in the mid 60's. I hope you all remembered to bring a rain jacket and/or umbrella.

On a plus side, if the sky's clear at night, and the city lights aren't too bright, we might be able to catch the aurora. There is a high-speed stream which is hitting the Earth and has produced aurora the last couple of nights in the area.


While traveling to the meeting today, make sure to watch out for crossing sturgeon


And sightings of Doctor Who. 


See you all soon!



Saturday, June 1, 2013

3 sleeps until the workshop!

The workshop is fast approaching, it's only 2 days away (or there a bouts). I hope you all have your 2- 3 slides ready to state what you are hoping to work on this coming week, possibly a poster to share, your registration money (check or cash no credit/debit cards; you will get a receipt for reimbursement), and any data/plots you are hoping to work with once you are there.

We are currently finishing up getting our data ready. If you haven't already checked out our wiki and you need our data for the workshop please do so. You can find all the relevant information there for our pre-release versions of the data. I will also hopefully have a copy of all of our data so that if you need a day or two's cdf files I can get them to you easily without having to depend on the internet connection.

According to John's e-mail there will be snacks starting at 8:30 each day so that people can leisurely start meeting before the brief morning talks. Tuesday and Wednesday the meeting will run from 9:00am - 5:00pm and Thursday from 9:00am -12:00pm (but rooms will be available for people to leave late).  John's e-mail also sent out a lot of topics that people have expressed interest in. If you are not already on the EFW and or BARREL list and would like to be, please contact me to be added.

BARREL has selected three time periods to really focus on (but we're more than happy to work on others as well) Jan 17th, Jan 26th, and Feb 2nd. We've put them in a special folder on the wiki. I've started a schedule for myself on the wiki for next week, but others should feel free to add their own meetings to it as well. Also feel free to contact me or the others on the list about joining our discussions. The more the merrier!


I hope to see you all there and safe travels!