This award supports an international workshop on interplanetary scintillations (IPS), a ground-based technique for observing solar corona in the important research area of space weather. The workshop will bring together leading researchers of worldwide IPS radio observatories to standardize the IPS data format and to provide ways to calibrate individual IPS systems incorporating observational data gathered from the August 2007 close pass of the Sun by NASA Ulysses spacecraft and the Air Force's Solar Mass Ejection Imager (SMEI) heliospheric white-light imager, which will be operational during peak Ulysses performance. The meeting, to be held October 30-31, 2007 in Toyokawa, Japan, will be jointly organized by the University of California at San Diego and the Solar-Terrestrial Environmental Laboratory (STELab) at Nagoya University. Researchers from IPS observatories in Australia, Europe, Mexico, Russia, and U.K. will also participate. Two U.S. junior researchers and one undergraduate will participate in the meeting. The ability to predict the onset of solar wind disturbances will help protect technical systems that are susceptible to conditions in the space environment.
