The project will support the annual CEDAR workshop for the next three summers. Each year, approximately 300 scientists and students attend the CEDAR (Coupling, Energetic, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions) workshop, a week-long meeting which features morning plenary sessions, individual workshops in the afternoons, and two poster sessions. Typically, about 100 students attend; the majority are graduate students but a small number of undergraduates (usually around 20) also participate. The CEDAR meeting begins with a day-long student workshop, organized by the two student members of the CEDAR Science Steering Committee. Subsequent days are devoted to the plenary sessions, afternoon workshops, and poster sessions. The plenary sessions include tutorial lectures and the CEDAR Prize Lecture which are videotaped for wide distribution. The afternoon workshops are organized and convened by members of the community: anyone can request a workshop several months before the meeting. The CEDAR Science Steering Committee receives the requests and allocates the meeting times and places. The afternoon workshops are one of the primary mechanisms for the community to initiate, plan, and undertake collaborative activities. An associated activity is the maintenance and operation of the CEDAR wiki, which provides access to the CEDAR database, community information, data services, documents, tools and models, and a forum. Overall, CEDAR is one of the primary means by which the aeronomy community educates and involves students, organizes its activities, and plans for its future.
The major goals of the project are to organize and hold three annual June NSF CEDAR (Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions) Workshops from 2008 to 2010, where the funds remaining were used in a subsequent award for the 2011 Workshop. CEDAR Workshops are the premier workshop for ground-based upper atmosphere researchers, and the best large workshops for undergraduate and graduate student involvement and networking. All CEDAR Workshops have a strong emphasis on students, with tutorial speakers, a Sunday Student Workshop, and judges for Student Poster Prizes. The 2008-2011 meetings were held in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, where the 2011 Workshop in Santa Fe was also joint with the NSF Geospace Environment Modelling (GEM) group representing magnetospheric and solar wind researchers. CEDAR Workshops normally draw about 25 undergraduate students, about 115 graduate students, and about 210 non-students. Most of this NSF grant goes to travel funds for the students. The meetings have plenary talks and individual workshops, where the workshop conveners are encouraged to consider students as both participants (including speakers) and observers. Each workshop has their own wiki page, which is linked in each annual meeting webpage, which is turn is available at the community website of http://cedarweb.hao.ucar.edu. Meeting participants are given a wiki login so anyone can enter text and update .pdf files of their talks to appropriate individual workshop pages for others to look at and for archival purposes. The plenary talks include tutorials for students and the community, annual CEDAR Prize lectures which recognize recent scientific advances, and occasional CEDAR Distinguished Lectures which honor lifetime scientific achievements. Shorter Science Highlights and CEDAR Post-doc final reports are also scheduled each year. The meetings are a venue where students and colleagues can collaborate with, listen to, and network with each other. Communication during the rest of the year is accomplished with the cedar_email to ~1600 in the community of announcments on jobs, meetings and other things of interest to the community. These announcements are available on-line at the community website given above, along with links to community databases of ground-based upper atmosphere data.
