Affiliate Scientist

Diego Janches

whawkins — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 23:26:11 +0000

Diego Janches whawkins Wed, 02/22/2023 - 16:26

Affiliate Scientist

Organization

NSF NCAR/HAO

Diego Janches is an affiliate scientist in the High Altitude Observatory (HAO). Dr. Diego Janches joined the NASA/GSFC Space Weather Laboratory in October 2010 and has extensive experience researching the Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere (MLT) atmospheric region. He spent time as a postdoctoral fellow at the Swedish Institute for Space Physics in Kiruna, Sweden; an NSF/CEDAR Postdoc at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, a visiting fellow at Kyoto University in Japan; and a Sr. Research Scientists at NorthWest Research Associates/CoRA office before joining NASA. Dr. Janches’ research expertise focus on resolving major outstanding problems related to the impact of the meteoric flux in the upper atmosphere, with primary emphasis on their role on the aeronomy of the MLT atmospheric region. Specific applications include: the sources and variations (temporal and geographical) of the meteoric flux, and its role in the chemical composition of the MLT; the origin and global distribution of the metallic layers, dynamical transport of metals, and modelling the subsequent formation of meteoric smoke and its seasonal distribution in the MLT; orbital dust distribution and populations in the solar system; asteroidal and cometary origins; the mechanisms by which metallic atoms are ablated from the meteoroid body and deposited in the MLT; physical and electronic risk assessment to satellites due to meteoroid impacts. He has extensive expertise in using radars, specifically Incoherent Scatter Radars and meteor radars to study the impact of meteors on the MLT. He also works on topics related to the impact of Gravity Waves (GWs) in the MLT and has helped develop a meteor radar design to measure vertical transfer of horizontal momentum flux in the MLT by GWs. He has deployed two of these radars in Southern Argentina and King George Island, Antarctica. At NASA, Dr. Janches is currently developing a spaceborne Na Lidar concept to be deployed in the International Space Station to study globally small-scale dynamics in the MLT. He has over 100 publications in Peer-Reviewed journals.

Slava Merkin

whawkins — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 23:09:17 +0000

Slava Merkin whawkins Wed, 02/22/2023 - 16:09

Affiliate Scientist

Organization

NSF NCAR/HAO

Slava Merkin is an affiliate scientist in the High Altitude Observatory (HAO). He is currently a scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Dr. Merkin has more than 22 years of experience in numerical modeling of space plasmas, in particular, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of the Earth’s magnetosphere and inner heliosphere. He has been deeply involved in the development of the Lyon-Fedder-Mobarry (LFM) MHD model of the global magnetosphere, and an adaptation of that code to the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field (LFM-helio), of which he is the primary author. He initiated and led a project devoted to the full redevelopment of LFM code, now called GAMERA. Dr. Merkin is an expert in the physics of the magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling, with a focus on its treatment in global simulations. Dr. Merkin has led a large multi-institutional team, including NSF NCAR/HAO, to win Phase I and Phase II proposals for the NASA DRIVE Science Center for Geospace Storms (CGS). CGS is developing a Multiscale Atmosphere-Geospace Environment (MAGE) model which include the coupling of the GAMERA magnetosphere model with the NSF NCAR ionosphere-thermosphere, and ultimately whole atmosphere models. Dr. Merkin’s work on the development of space plasma simulation codes, and coupling between different physical regions and regimes, has spanned the domains from Earth’s ionosphere, to the magnetosphere and solar wind. He has contributed to many areas of space research, including the physics of the strongly driven magnetosphere, magnetopause boundary instabilities, magnetotail stability and reconnection, particle acceleration, and heliospheric magnetic structure, among others. Dr. Merkin is an active member of the space science community: the models he has developed are available through the Community Coordinated Modeling Center to a wide range of scientists; he has served as a Research Area Coordinator for the Geospace Environment Modeling community; he regularly serves on review panels and as a peer reviewer for scientific journals; he has served as a member of the AGU SPA Fellow selection committee in 2022; he is currently serving as a member of the NSF NCAR SIMA Advisory Committee; and he is serving as a member of the Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) 2024-2033 Committee.

Silvano Fineschi

kolinski — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 19:48:58 +0000

Silvano Fineschi kolinski Fri, 04/29/2022 - 13:48

Affiliate Scientist

Organization

NSF NCAR/HAO

Silvano Fineschi is an affiliate scientist in the High Altitude Observatory. He is currently a scientist at the Observatory of Turin. The Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino is an astronomical observatory owned and operated by Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics, (INAF). It is located on the top of a hill in the town of Pino Torinese in Italy, and was founded in 1759.

Dr. Fineschi has more than 20 years of experience in the development and operation of space instrumentation for spectroscopy and polarimetry in the visible and UV wavelength bands. His scientific interests include the application of atomic spectroscopy and polarimetry to UV and visible-light remote-sensing techniques for the study of the solar wind and the coronal magnetic field. He has been involved in several solar space missions of NASA and ESA (SMM, Spartan/Space-Shuttle, SOHO, Solar Orbiter), sounding-rocket solar experiments (SCORE), and eclipse campaigns. He is currently the Project Scientist for the METIS coronagraph on the Solar Orbiter mission and the Principal Investigator of the sounding-rocket coronagraphic experiment (SCORE) for the sub-orbital re-flight of the HERSCHEL payload.

Haosheng Lin

kolinski — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 15:01:11 +0000

Haosheng Lin kolinski Tue, 04/19/2022 - 09:01

Affiliate Scientist

Organization

NSF NCAR/HAO

Haosheng Lin has been an High Altitude Observatory (HAO) affiliate scientist since 2003. He is an astronomer in the Solar Physics group of the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii.

Haosheng specializes in instrumentation for solar physics and infrared measurements of solar magnetic fields. After obtaining his PhD from Michigan State University, he worked at the National Solar Observatory in Sacramento Peak, NM, before taking up his present appointment at the University of Hawaii.

Haosheng is the PI of the Diffraction Limited Near-IR Spectro-Polarimeter (DL-NIRSP), one of the first-light instruments for the NSF-sponsored Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST). He is a member of the Coronal Solar Magnetism Observatory (COSMO) consortium and was co-PI (with Thomas Zurbuchen of the University of Michigan and Steve Tomczyk) of the COSMO proposal submitted to the NSF. On his visits to Boulder he collaborates with HAO scientists and members of the Instrumentation Group on new instrumentation concepts, and works with the Coronal Multichannel Polarimeter (COMP) data.

Martin Mlynczak

kolinski — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 14:53:20 +0000

Martin Mlynczak kolinski Tue, 04/19/2022 - 08:53

Affiliate Scientist

Organization

NSF NCAR/HAO

Marty Mlynczak has been an High Altitude Observatory (HAO) affiliate scientist since 2000. He is a senior research scientist in the Climate Science Branch at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA.

Marty's research is centered on understanding the climate of the whole atmosphere, troposphere to upper thermosphere. He is particularly focused on understanding the infrared radiative processes responsible for cooling the atmosphere and he currently leads (or has led) several satellite, ground-based, aircraft, balloon, and suborbital rocket experiments to observe infrared emissions in the entire sensible atmosphere.

While visiting NSF NCAR, Marty works with a number of scientists in HAO and also in the Atmospheric Chemistry Division, primarily comparing measurements and models. He spent a year on sabbatical at HAO in 1998–1999 and still counts that experience as a defining period of his career. Current collaborations are related to studying the effects of the unusual solar activity of the last decade, and the chemistry and energy balance in the stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere.

One of his significant contributions includes the comparison of CO2 15-micron cooling rates in the thermospheres of Venus, Earth, and Mars, and the implications for the heat budgets of these three planets. The Mars Thermosphere General Circulation Model (MTGCM) code has been used extensively to prepare for and conduct aerobraking activities at Mars since 1997. The Thermospheric General Circulation Model for Venus (VTGCM) has recently been applied to the interpretation of Venus Express nightglow emissions and the implications for global dynamics. Finally, the MTGCM is presently being used to plan for the upcoming MAVEN mission to Mars, which will obtain measurements to determine the volatile escape rates.

On visits to HAO, Marty and his family also love to hike in the Flatirons and in Rocky Mountain National Park. Dinners and evening walks in the Pearl Street area are also in favor, as are visits to the many brew pubs in the area.

Javier Trujillo Bueno

kolinski — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 14:46:04 +0000

Javier Trujillo Bueno kolinski Tue, 04/19/2022 - 08:46

Affiliate Scientist

Organization

NSF NCAR/HAO

Javier Trujillo Bueno is an affiliate scientist in the High Altitude Observatory (HAO). He has a doctorate in Physics from the University of Göttingen (Germany) and is a Research Professor of the Spanish Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), destined to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC).

He has extensive experience in the field of solar physics, and specifically in solar magnetism, theoretical and observational spectropolarimetry, the quantum theory of spectral line polarization, radiative transfer in magnetized plasmas, and numerical simulations. For the last 25 years he has pursued the development and application of novel methods, based on optically-polarized atoms, for investigating the magnetism of the solar atmosphere. Since 2011 he is one of the Principal Investigators of CLASP (Chromospheric Lyman-Alpha SpectroPolarimeter), a series of space experiments using NASA sub-orbital rockets, motivated by the theoretical studies of Professor Trujillo Bueno and his international group. These, and other achievements, have served to make him the first Spanish scientist to obtain an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant in the field of “Science of the Universe”.

Mei Zhang

kolinski — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 14:41:59 +0000

Mei Zhang kolinski Tue, 04/19/2022 - 08:41

Affiliate Scientist

Organization

NSF NCAR/HAO

Mei Zhang has been a High Altitude Observatory (HAO) affiliate scientist since 2004. She is a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, and chief scientist at the Huairou Solar Observing Station located in the outskirts of Beijing.

Mei studies solar magnetic fields with a particular interest in the million-degree hot, ionized solar corona. This hydromagnetic atmosphere connects the Sun to the perennial outflow of supersonic solar wind that fills interplanetary space. Mei has made several fundamental contributions to our understanding of the formation of long-lived coronal structures and their two forms of eruption, solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These hydromagnetic processes play collective roles in the evolution of the corona in response to the global reversals of the Sun's magnetic field in cycles of 11 years. This phenomenon is a principal driver of space weather and climate.

Among Mei's scientific contributions is the intriguing theory that a theoretical bound exists for the magnetic twist, or helicity, trapped under conditions of high electrical conductivity in a coronal structure in equilibrium, developed in collaboration with Natasha Flyer (IMAGe) and B. C. Low (HAO). Observations have shown that the fields in each cycle emerge preferentially with negative and positive twists in the northern and southern solar hemispheres, respectively; true for all solar cycles. A Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) can then be simply explained as a failure of a pre-existing coronal structure's self-confinement due to an excessive accumulation of like-signed helicity. This theory is corroborated by the CME numerical simulations of Yuhong Fan and Sarah Gibson at HAO and other colleagues in the university community.

Mei is a graduate of Peking University, receiving her Ph.D. in 1999 from the educational system within the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2000, Art J. Hundhausen created a visiting scientist position in coronal physics with funds he received after having been awarded the Arctowski Medal from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The selection of Mei for this position brought her to HAO where she was appointed project scientist, 2001-2004, supported by the NSF Solar, Heliospheric, and Interplanetary Environment Program, following which she rejoined her Observatory under the 100 Talents Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Joe Huba

kolinski — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 16:55:24 +0000

Joe Huba kolinski Wed, 04/13/2022 - 10:55

Affiliate Scientist

Organization

NSF NCAR/HAO

Joe Huba is a Senior Research Scientist at Syntek Technologies in Virginia, who collaborates with the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) on modeling the ionosphere, plasmasphere, and magnetosphere. Joe’s main research interests include boundaries and wave phenomena in plasma, processes involving Earth’s upper atmosphere and magnetic field, and approaches to modelling these systems. More specifically, he leads and conducts research in magnetospheric-ionospheric-thermospheric coupling physics, magnetic reconnection, ionospheric irregularities and computational plasma physics. He is expert at simulations of the Earth's upper atmosphere, in particular he is the originator and co-developer of the NRL ionosphere models SAMI2 and SAMI3.

During Joe's affiliate scientist appointment, he is contributing to NSF NCAR's and HAO's imperative activity to advance world-leading numerical models of the atmosphere and Sun-Earth system, and to HAO's Frontier program III (how small-scale structures are produced in the upper atmosphere, and their effects on global dynamics). Joe is working with Stan Solomon, Hanli Liu, Art Richmond, Gang Lu and other members of the Atmosphere, Ionosphere, Magnetosphere section, on state-of-the-art ionospheric models, in line with the above strategic priorities.

Outside the office Joe enjoys playing squash and exercising at local health clubs, frequenting rock venues in DC and Baltimore, and playing with his granddaughters. In Boulder he more than enjoys the excellent brew pub scene.

Affiliate Scientist

Diego Janches

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Slava Merkin

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Silvano Fineschi

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Haosheng Lin

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Martin Mlynczak

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Javier Trujillo Bueno

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Mei Zhang

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Joe Huba

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