Harriet Turner – h.turner3@pgr.reading.ac.uk
This trip contained several firsts for me – first flight, first international conference and first in-person conference presentation. The 18th annual European Space Weather Week was held in Zagreb, Croatia from 24th to 28th October 2022, with delegates from Europe, the US and Australia present. The week was full of interesting talks and lively socials, culminating with the Reading lot (plus a postdoc from Imperial) completing the “secret social” lunar themed escape room in the second fastest time of the week.
It always feels more official when your name is on a lanyard!
The week started with the standard conference registration followed by some tutorials and a live space weather forecast. Space weather refers to the changing plasma conditions in near-Earth space, which can pose a threat to modern life. It can lead to communication failures, damage to satellites, blackouts, and harm the health of humans in space. For this reason, it is important to forecast space weather so that these impacts can be mitigated against. The afternoon of the first day consisted of two parallel sessions and a poster session, with a reception buffet in the evening. The parallel sessions ran throughout the week, covering a wide range of topics from ways to improve our space weather forecasting capabilities to measuring and modelling geoelectric fields.
Tuesday was filled with more parallel sessions containing a wide range of talks, including my first in-person conference presentation of my PhD. I was rather nervous to present my work in front of a (quite large) room full of experts in the field, however I think it was well received and I had some interesting questions.
I study the solar wind, which is a constant stream of charged particles that flows off the Sun and is an important component of space weather. I have been using data assimilation (DA) to forecast the solar wind, which combines model output and observations to form an optimum estimation of reality. For DA to work in an operational context, it needs to work with real time data. This often contains more data gaps and erroneous observations when compared with the cleaned-up science level data, which has been used for previous analysis of solar wind DA. To cut a long story short, my work has shown that the real time data does not significantly worsen the forecasts, meaning that DA could be used for operational solar wind forecasting. Which is what we wanted to hear! I celebrated the presentation being over with a big pizza, followed by the conference music night hosted in a local bar. Turns out there are some talented musicians in the space weather community!
On the stage presenting the slide on the data assimilation scheme I have been analysing.
The rest of the week went by in a blur of parallel and poster sessions, with the conference dinner on the Thursday evening and everything wrapping up on Friday lunchtime. With flights back to the UK not until Monday evening, we had plenty of time to explore what Zagreb had to offer. Saturday was spent exploring the Mushroom Museum (spoiler alert, it was full of mushrooms) and the Museum of Broken Relationships. The latter of the two was filled with donated items that were special in some way or another and symbolised the end of a meaningful relationship. There were certainly some quirky exhibits, but a good attraction for sure.
There was not mushroom for anything else… (I’ll show myself out).
We filled Sunday with a tram ride to the north of Zagreb to the Sljeme cable car. The cable car took us from 267m up to the mountain summit at 1030m, which, for context, is 55m lower than Snowdon. One thing that will remain with me is just how foggy it was in Zagreb, so rising out of the fog in the cable car provided some great views. We could see the cloud hanging low in the valley and it was glorious sunshine at the top. The mountains were covered in trees that were turning into their autumn colours, which certainly was a beautiful sight.
With most of Monday to spare, we explored another museum. This time it was the Museum of Illusions, which was a lot of fun. There were a lot of interactive exhibits, including ones where you can make a kaleidoscope of your own face and play poker with 7 versions of yourself. It led to some truly horrifying photos.
View from the cable car over the mountains.
Overall, it was a tiring yet productive and enjoyable trip. I enjoyed networking with many scientists in my field, many of whom I had only seen as a name on a paper or on Twitter. It was great to see how work in the field is advancing and I look forward to being a part of that in the future.
Finally, a tip if you are visiting Croatia, try Čoksa salted peanut chocolate, it’s great. The forest fruits flavour is also great, but the banana has received mixed reviews!
The Social Metwork 