Wednesday, July 29, 2015

BARREL Daily E-mail update

Hej, (Swedish for Hi)

This post is from the test e-mail making sure that everyone who needs to be on the daily e-mail list is on the daily e-mail list. If you did not receive an e-mail and should have, please let me know. As with the last two campaigns a shortened version of these e-mails will be posted on this blog.  

Summary of the EFW/EMFISIS team meeting disscusions:
Yesterday we had a discussion in the EFW/EMFISIS team meetings about how the daily e-mails and telecoms will work for the Kiruna mission. There wasn't too much discussion about changes to how the burst coordination was previously run. Below are short summaries of the important bits.

Daily e-mails
I'll start the daily e-mails next week after I arrive in Sweden (sometime on or after August 3rd). Our first absolute possible  launch date is August 7th, but this will of course depend on the stratospheric winds as well as the ground weather. The daily e-mails (as well as posts on this blog) will try to keep everyone up to date on how this date may change. 

Daily Telecons
As these aren't necessary right away, we'll try to push them off as much as possible. We'll have our first tag up on August 5th at 6pm Kiruna time (12:00 Dartmouth time, 11:00 am Minneapolis/Iowa time, 10:00 am University of Colorado Boulder, 9:00 am Berkley time). This telecom will consist of updating the current launch likelihood for August 7th, an update on the BARREL campaign set up, and any other discussions that may be needed prior to the first possible launch. At this time we'll again decide when the next telecom is, e.g. do we need to start them up right away or decide on when we'll have the next check in. Also make sure to check the daily e-mails for updates on this.  

Missions specific information (Van Allen Probes, MMS, BIERS, FIREBIRD, HiT&MIS and others)
If you would like to have information added to the daily e-mails I'm happy to oblige. In the past I have try to include information from real (or near real time) observatories such as magnetometers, GOES, and SW data. We of course also include information on the burst times that we have identified as interesting and are telemetering down from the Van Allen Probes and include that in the daily e-mails as well. If you would like to have other information included please send me an update at least two hours prior to the daily tag up time. If I get the update after I've sent out the daily e-mail, the update will be included in the next day's e-mail.

If I've forgotten anything please let me know. If I've forgotten to add anyone on the list, or you would like to be removed, please let me know as well. 

Hej då (Swedish for goodbye)

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Burst Collaboration Discussions

To those who are at the Van Allen Probes science working group meeting - We'll be discussing the burst coordination for this upcoming campaign (the first batch of people are leaving this Friday!) during the EFW/EMFISIS joint team meetings. For those not at the meeting, I'll put an update here.

Most important things:

1) The predicted files will once again be up on dropbox
2) We'll once again be having the daily e-mails, so if you would like to be on the e-mail list please let us know. We'll also be putting those e-mails up on here as was done during the last two campaigns.
3) We'll again be having the daily call in, but not sure yet when those will start
4) an overview of the other missions (besides Van Allen) that will be coordinating with BARREL for this campaign.

Talk to you all soon, and as a teaser, here's the first possible conjunctions we could potentially have at Kiruna. Should be really exciting!


Friday, July 24, 2015

Some light summer reading from the BARREL team.

Looking for something to read for this summer? Well we have something for you. Within the last month we've had two new BARREL papers published.

Lauren Blum et al published another GRL on the January 18 & 19 2013 relativistic electron events. It's a great new look at EMIC waves and when they may be responsible for relativistic electron precipitation.

The second paper is one that we've been working on for a long time. It's on two event time periods, one on the 3rd and the other on the 6th of January 2014. For each event we had some fantastic conjunctions between the array of BARREL balloons and the two Van Allen Probes. We were able to show that the plasmapsheric hiss, and then the precipitation where the hiss was resonant with radiation belt particles, was coherent across large regions of the plasmasphere.

Okay so perhaps this isn't really the light summer reading that you were hoping for, but we hope you enjoy them any way!


The Nature journal where our paper is published.