According to the GCI M/LT white paper the project was planned to start in 2022 with the VortEX campaign. Due to the ongoing COVID pandemic VortEX is postponed until 2023. This gives us a perfect opportunity to plan complementary and new campaigns during and after VortEX. Currently, the white paper has entries from 9 nations on possible science topics, technologies, platforms, ground based observatories and potential research partners. We have indications that Belgium will become the 10th participant, but this is not confirmed yet.
The Zoom session will take place June 22, 2021, 1000-1200 MST (1700-1900 CET) and will be chaired as a “regular” session. The CEDAR web holds more information about this session here http://cedarweb.vsp.ucar.edu/wiki/index.php/2021_Workshop:Grand_Challenge_Initiative_MLT
A side step:
Due to the recent announcement by the AGU Fall Meeting organizers that this years conference will be a hybrid event with both physical and virtual attendance, and many of us will be vaccinated before the summer, the GCI Core Work group has decided to propose such a hybrid GCI M/LT session. We hope that many of you will have the opportunity to meet physically, and that in this way we can give our common project a necessary injection of energy and increase progress. As mentioned earlier, the pandemic has made it much more difficult to organize the sequel to the successful GCI CUSP project, since meeting physically several times a year (normally CEDAR and AGU FM) contributes to a sense of unity and common goals that one does not achieve as well through online meetings.
Both CEDAR and AGU FM allows remote participation, hence everyone can give talks in both if they wish, and since we’re long overdue when it comes to physical talks and planning in the GCI M/LT, AGU FM should be the preferred action this year due to the fact that this gives us an opportunity to actually organize a small workshop like we used to have in the CUSP buildup Therefor, I suggest that we use this CEDAR session to only give short updates (save the longer talks for AGU FM) on ongoing/planned/proposed projects and new initiatives related to GCI M/LT, plus discussions on items for the AGU FM afternoon workshop (scenarios/missions (rockets, balloons, aircraft etc)/ground based campaigns etc).
Please sign up for the June 22nd CEDAR workshop with your name, email, suggested title of your short status update or new initiative information (5 min max). Deadline for signing up will be June 7th 2021.