Catalin Negrea, researcher of the Institute of Space Science (ISS) within the Laboratory of Space Plasma and Magnetometry won the award for the best poster presented by a student (Outstanding Student Poster – OSP) following the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union – EGU held in Vienna from 27 April to 2 May 2014.
PhD student at the University of Colorado – Boulder and also at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Catalin Negrea conducts research aimed at characterizing the influence of the Earth’s lower atmosphere on space meteorology by transporting energy and momentum using fluid waves, called gravity waves [1]. Within ISS, Catalin participates in research dedicated to optimize spectral analysis of data produced by ionospheric observatories and satellites.
Catalin won the OSP award with „Gravity Wave Detection Methodology Using Dynasonde Data”, and he is the second researcher of the Institute of Space Science that wins this prize, after Gabriel Voitcu in 2008. His project examines the gravity waves bornt as a result of extreme events such as earthquakes and hurricanes, but also as a result of everyday weather phenomena. These waves can propagate hundreds of kilometers in altitude and thousands of km horizontally and can affect the functioning of communication systems.
‘Using a specialised radar, the disturbances caused by these waves at altitudes of 150-450 km can be detected’, said Catalin Negrea, explaining the idea behind his project. ‘The detection method that I proposed in this paper allows the evaluation of the effect of these waves in the terrestrial ionosphere [2]. I used measurements done at Wallops Island in Virginia and San Juan in Puerto Rico, which demonstrated the importance of meteorological phenomena on the ionosphere and therefore on the GPS and communications systems’, he added.
The competition results were recently published on the EGU website. The abstract of the winning poster can be read here.
Outstanding Student Poster (OSP) is a special award given by the EGU in order to improve the overall quality of poster presentations and encourage younger colleagues to present their work in major scientific conferences. This prize was awarded for the first time to a Romanian scientist in 2008, when a researcher from ISS, Dr. Gabriel Voitcu, was awarded within the solar-terrestrial sciences section.
For more information about the OSP awards, including the participation criteria and how to enter the competition, visit the OSP official webpage.
About EGU
The European Geosciences Union is an international association of scientists with over 12,500 members worldwide, and also the first union in Europe dedicated to excellence in geosciences and in planetary and space sciences for the benefit of all mankind.
EGU was established in September 2002 following the merger of the European Geophysical Society (EGS) and the European Union of Geosciences (EUG), based in Munich, Germany.
The Institute of Space Science (ISS) from Magurele, Romania, develops research projects in fields such as astroparticle physics, high energy physics, astrophysics and cosmology, space plasma physics and applied research, design and development of space technology. ISS participates in research projects funded by the European Union and it has engaged in nationally and internationally renowned collaborations and partnerships (CERN-ALICE, ANTARES, KM3NeT, Pierre Auger Observatory), in the ESA space program’s missions such as Euclid, Planck, Cluster, SWARM, participates in research projects funded by the European Union (FP7) and has worked with NASA for the first Romanian experiment sent on International Space Station.
Notes
[1] The gravity waves are a class of fluids which appear in the Earth’s atmosphere. They arise at low altitudes and may propogate at long distances due to one trait of the Earth’s atmosphere: the density decrease when the altitude increases. This allows the relatively small magnitude phenomena at ground level to have considerable effects at high altitudes, in the terrestrial ionosphere.
[2] The ionosphere is a region of Earth’s atmosphere located between 85 and 600 km altitude.