Drs. Michael Kosch and Judy Stephenson have announced that the SuperDARN 2020 Workshop will be held in South Africa, 31 May to 5 June. The Workshop is sponsored by the University of Kwazulu-Natal and the South African National Space Agency (SANSA). In their words: 'The location will be the Sani Pass hotel in the beautiful Drakensberg mountains. We will provide a single shuttle bus on 31 May and 5 June to/from this remote location. The venue is at high altitude in the winter, so please expect freezing but dry conditions at night, yet warm and sunny conditions in the daytime. Those venturing to the top of Sani pass into the Kingdom of Lesotho can expect freezing conditions all day with possible snow (with no skiing), but the highest pub in Africa has a solution for this.'
Conference web site: https://superdarn2019.ukzn.ac.za.
Abstract deadlines: Abstracts - 10 April
Registration deadlines: Early - 30 April Late - 10 May
Any enquiries, please contact Judy at .
Photo credit: Conference web site (Drakensberg cathedral peaks with aloes)

Simon Shepherd has announced that the Altitude Adjusted Corrected Geomagnetic Coordinates (AACGM-v2) model, originally developed to compare conjugacy of data from SuperDARN radars in the northern and southern hemispheres Baker and Wing, 1989, has been updated. In his words:

'With the recent release of the 13th generation International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF-13) (https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/IAGA/vmod/igrf.html) an update to AACGM-v2 is now available at http://superdarn.thayer.dartmouth.edu/aacgm.html

The update includes new AACGM-v2 coefficients that extend the date range to 2025 and small changes to the software to accommodate the new date range and coefficient files.

Note that small differences in the IGRF-13 coefficients will cause corresponding small changes in AACGM-v2 coordinates derived using the new model for dates beginning in 2010.'

With the help of SuperDARN collaborators, Dr. Evan Thomas at Dartmouth College has rebuilt the list of student products that have drawn on or benefited from SuperDARN research activities. The list contains nearly 200 items and is sorted by author and year. Evan has posted the list to a publicly available Github repository: https://github.com/SuperDARN/theses_dissertations

The repository includes a few sample C programs to demonstrate parsing the thesis/dissertation text file and building html for displaying on a webpage.

In Evan's words: 'Thank you again to everyone who has contributed and please help me keep this resource up-to-date as your current and future students complete their degree programs.'

October 31, 2019: Kevin Sterne notified the SuperDARN collaboration that the hard drive capability of the VT SuperDARN server is being expanded. In his words: '..for the next few days, data from 2019 may be limited via the VT website. My apologies for this inconvenience, but it comes with the advantage of being able to store many more years of data.For any immediate needs, you can e-mail me off list at .'

Notes on current VT Server:
We have a JetStor RAID 6 array by ACNC (http://www.acnc.com/) with 24 4 TB harddrives attached to a computer running Ubuntu 12.04 Server Linux. Because of the way RAID 6 and file systems work, this effectively gives us 77 TB worth of storage. The RAID array looks like a giant hard drive to our server.

On behalf of co-Chair Emma Bland (UNIS) and the SuperDARN Data Analysia Working Group (DAWG), co-Chair Kevin Sterne (VT) has announced that the latest version of the Radar Software Toolkit (RST) has been released. This is a comprehensive package of software for processing and analyzing SuperDARN radar data. The previous release, version 4.2, occurred a little over a year ago. In Kevin's words: 'You can download..by pulling from the repository's master branch or by downloading one of these files:
https://github.com/SuperDARN/rst/archive/v4.3.zip
https://github.com/SuperDARN/rst/archive/v4.3.tar.gz '
Notes on the release are available via the repository's release page and are copied to the 'Read More' section of this announcement.

Note that a new DOI entry has been created with this release. The software package can be cited with:

Evan Thomas, Kevin Sterne, Simon Shepherd, kkotyk, Marina Schmidt, pasha-ponomarenko, … Michal Krzysztofowicz. (2019, September 6). SuperDARN/rst: RST 4.3 (Version v4.3). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3401622

Prior to the SuperDARN 2019 workshop held in Fujiyoshida, Japan during the first week of June, 2019, Dr. Mark Lester of Leicester University had indicated his intention to step down as Chair of the SuperDARN Executive Council. During PI discussions at the workshop it was decided to replace Dr. Lester with a new Chair and two Vice Chairs. The new Chair is Prof. Kathryn McWilliams of the University of Saskatchewan and the Vice Chairs are Prof. Nozomu Nishitani of ISEE / Nagoya University and Dr. Aurélie Marchaudon of IRAP/CNRS/IPEV.

Mark thanks all members of the SuperDARN community for their help and support and states that it was his privilege to have been the lead PI over the last 15 years.

Congratulations to Kathryn, Nozomu, and Aurélie!

Pictured: Prof. Kathryn McWilliams at the SuperDARN Workshop 2019 (Fujiyoshida, Japan)

Photo credit: SD2019 General Organizing Committee