IITC Newsletter Vol 1 No 3 : 06 September 2001 ============================================== All... Welcome to the IITC's third newsletter: 1. List Server. ---------------- We have established an e-mail listserver at NWRA in Bellevue to facilitate intra-group communications. For those of you who are not familiar with these, you can send an e-mail to the group e-mail address and it will be sent to everyone subscribing to the list. To subscribe, send an e-mail message to majordomo@nwra.com with the single line: subscript tomo_list in the body of the message. You will receive a response from the server asking that you authenticate that the request came from you. Reply to this as directed in the server's note and you will be subscribed. You will also receiver instructions on how to unsubscribe from the list should you so desire. My original plan was to use this server to send out the newsletter, but decided to keep the newsletter list separate so that those who want only the newsletter will still receive it without having to subscribe to the listserver. For those of you familiar with these servers, we have not enabled digest capability. I doubt that the traffic on this list will be burdensome, although we can add that capability later if it becomes necessary. PLEASE - will everyone using this listserver be respectful of others on the list. Stay on the topic (ionospheric tomography), and please don't send lengthy e-mails, large graphics files, etc. Also, due to the current status of viruses on the loose, please do not include attachments unless absolutely necessary. This is not going to be a moderated list, so we all must take it upon ourselves to moderate our own behavior. 2. Collection dates. --------------------- Campaign #1: 19-20 September 2001 Campaign #2: 12-13 December 2001 3. IITC Web Site. ------------------ Ed and I hope to be able to put up a simple web site for the group with links to web sites run by members of the group and to other sites of general interest. There's no date for this, but please start sending the URLs of web pages you would like linked to from this page. 4. Workshop Location. ---------------------- There are two meetings in May 2002 that might be targets for our planned tomography workshop: (1) the triennial Ionospheric Effects Symposium in Washington, DC, on 7-9 May (Tue-Thu) , or (2) the Third URSI Commission G International Symposium on the High Latitude Ionosphere in Fairbanks, Alaska, on 15-17 May (Wed-Fri). We had discussed having a two-day workshop. For the URSI meeting, we could fit this in on the first two days of that week (13,14 May). For the IES meeting, we would either need to have a split workshop (meet Mon and Fri, 6 and 10 May) or work one week-end day (either Sun+Mon 5,6 May; or Fri+Say, 10-11 May). Another option is to meet for just one day and have after-hours meetings as necessary around the other meeting. We have a tentative statement of support from the Naval Research Laboratory for the IES meeting, and have not checked yet with the Geophysical Institute regarding facilities at their meeting. We would like feedback from the group on which of these two meetings would be best for them, and if the IES meeting is preferred which of the various date options (split, prior to, or after the IES) are preferred. 5. Workshop Strawman "Sessions". --------------------------------- Gary Bust has come up with the following list of proposed sessions to be held at this workshop. I've added one more (on accuracy issues) based on a short e-mail discussion with Dr. Yeh. Please send further suggestions to Gary Bust . a) sharing data/ discussing results, deciding what we want to do next with the data we have obtained from the world days b) future plans for the group in general meetings etc, common data formats, etc c) science we want to address d) possible algorithms we want to pursue - global, multiple data, realtime e) accuracy and limitations of tomographic techniques 6. Common file formats. ------------------------ Several of the group have brought up the topic of defining common formats for data files to be used by the community for data and analysis sharing, a topic that should be part of the forthcoming workshop. We (NWRA) have started using the netCDF format for our relative-TEC data files and have set up a web page which describes this format as well as the format of an interim ASCII-format file. I have posted descriptions of these two file formats on the NWRA Tucson web site as a departure point for this discussion. Jim