Noora Partamies describes experiences from a substorm school in Iceland, part of IPY project 63; ICESTAR/IHY. Once again the space physics group of the University of Bergen put together a substorm school for Master and PhD students in space physics. This time the course was organised together with Finnish Meteorological Institute. Six students and two lecturers from Norway met three students and two lecturers from Finland for ten days in late November to learn, observe and discuss substorm related processes in the near Earth space. The course location was a small Fosshótel Nesbúð in Nesjavellir about 80 km east of Reykjavik, a few kilometres off the shore of the Icela...

Roughly twenty attendees from all over Finland got together to enjoy a secondary school summer course in scenic Utsjoki in Finnish Lapland. During the two week course in June 2007, the theme aurora borealis (revontulet, i.e. fires of fox in Finnish) brought in basic understanding of near-Earth space, upper atmospheric physics, as well as circus, performing arts and music. "One of the main ideas of this course was to let the science meet the arts," says Juhani Harjunharja, the director of the summer school who works as a physics teacher in the Lappish secondary school at Utsjoki. "The miracles of the space and the methods in the auroral research can stimulate the artists. Maybe the art performances can add to the scientific enthusiasm, too." Scientific ...

Space scientists performing boundary layer experiments at the edge of Greenland ice cap. Introduction The Greenland Space Science Symposium was arranged in Kangerlussuaq as part of the International Polar Year activities from the 4 to 9 May. The Symposium solemnized the rich history of Greenland as a forum for versatile instrumentation monitoring various processes in the near-Earth space. For example, the behavior of ionospheric electric currents have been monitored now for 35 years with Danish magnetometer chains operating in the Greenland coastal regions. Almost equally long data records (25 years) of plasma densities, velocities, and temperatures have been collected with the US incoherent scatter radar operating in Kelly Ville. Roughly 70 space scie...

Gone fishing? IPY flying high at midnight on 1 January 2007 at SANAE IV, the South African research base on Vesleskarvet in Dronning Maud Land Antarctica (71

A kick-off meeting of the IPY Core Project "Heliosphere Impact on Geospace" (IPY ID#63) was arranged in Helsinki on February 5-9 2007, with about 40 scientists from 14 different countries attending. The meeting was held at the facilities of the Finnish Meteorological Institute. The "Heliosphere Impact on Geospace" project coordinates multinational research on solar-terrestrial events which affect the composition and dynamics of the earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere, and atmosphere in the Polar regions. This is a consortium of 29 research projects from 22 countries which expressed their interest to the IPY, and the consortium's management responsibilities are carried by two complementary programs:"...