THE NERC MST RADAR FACILITY AT ABERYSTWYTH

Announcement 2008-11-26

MST12 Workshop and Radar School - May 2008 - London, Ontario, Canada
The Twelfth International Workshop on Technical and Scientific Aspects of MST Radar (MST12) will be held:
Dates: 17 - 23 May 2009
Location: London, Ontario, Canada
which is the week before the American Geophysical Union 2009 Joint Assembly (24 - 27 May), which will be held in Toronto - only 200 km from London Ontario.

The deadline for abstract submission is Friday 23rd January 2009.

There will be a radar school immediately prior to the MST12 workshop:
Dates: 12 - 16 May 2009
which is intended for students, post-docs and anyone who is new to the field. More details about the workshop and school can be found below or through the MST12 website.

The MST12 Workshop
The workshop will cover the following sessions:
  1. Scattering, Calibration and Microscale processes
    • small-scale processes: turbulence, metre-scale waves, blini.
    • turbulence as it relates to scattering (climatologies of turbulence belong in session 5 or 6)
    • non-turbulent scattering
    • radar calibration, C_n^2
    • hydrometeors as scatterers; water vapour as it pertains to scattering
    • non-plasma scattering
    • PMSE may be included, but also see section 4 for PMSE discussions involving details of plasma processes.

  2. New instruments, signal processing, and quality control
    • New radar designs
    • new receivers, digitizers, radar sub-components
    • new approaches to signal-processing
    • re-evaluation of older techniques
    • rejection of poor data
    • filtering techniques

  3. Meteors studied with MST radar.
    • atmospheric winds studied via meteor trails (concentration on basic science - climatologies, tides etc should be in section 6)
    • atmospheric temperatures deduced from meteor trails
    • formation of meteor trails
    • Turbulence, momentum flux from meteor trails
    • some limited astronomical studies may be included if they were made with MST type radars.

  4. Plasma irregularities
    • PMSE (multifrequency, heating, interhemispheric comparisons)
    • Using radar echoes from plasma irregularities (EEJ, ESF, QP, 150-km echoes) to diagnose the ionosphere/atmosphere with coherent scatter radars (densities, temperatures, winds, electric fields)
    • 2D and 3D radar imaging of plasma irregularities

  5. Meteorology and forecasting/nowcasting
    • Dynamics
    • Water vapour, clouds (esp. in the context of multi-instrument comparisons)
    • application of radars and networks of radars to forecasting/nowcasting
    • mountain waves
    • meteorology as sources of waves and turbulence
    • special campaigns

  6. Middle Atmosphere Dynamics and Structure
    • Planetary waves and tides
    • CAWSES
    • Gravity Waves
    • turbulence (specifically results that look at long term variations, climatology etc - mechanics of turbulence microphysics belongs in section 1)
    • long-term trends

  7. Tropopause processes and Stratospheric/Tropospheric Exchange
    • ozone transport and tropopause variability
    • turbulence and specular scatterers at the tropopause
    • characteristics of radar-tropopause at different latitudes (e.g. equatorial and polar)

  8. Special Topics
    • special areas new to the field, or which do not fit in the above. e.g. lightning (the convenors may incorporate these into other sessions at a later date).
The Radar School
In addition to providing lectures on the topics shown below, the school will involve a hands-on component. One day will be spent visiting one of the 5 radars which are within 2-3 hours of the school venue. This will give the students the opportunity to carry out different experiments. There will subsequently be a data analysis session for which the students are expected to bring their own laptop and data analysis/plotting software (e.g. Matlab or IDL).
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