The Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) Workshop; Cleveland, Ohio; March 22-23, 2024

This award provides support to the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) workshop to be held at Case Western Reserve University between March 22-23, 2024. The HamSCI workshop is an annual workshop that aims to bring together members of the amateur radio and professional radio space science communities for mutual benefit. This workshop series has led to cutting-edge work in the fields of space physics, citizen science, and the use of crowd-sourced ionospheric data. The 2024 HamSCI Workshop will feature prominent leaders in radio science, space science, and space weather. This workshop aims at discussing the 2023 solar eclipse results and prepare for the upcoming 2024 solar eclipse event. The meeting theme of “Alignment”, inspired by the recent 2023 and upcoming 2024 solar eclipses, refers also to alignment within the scientific strategy of the HamSCI initiative: between collegiate amateur radio recreation and STEM curriculum; between data collection and analysis; between professional and citizen science. During this two-day workshop, professionals and amateurs come together to give oral and poster presentations, equipment demonstrations, and have informal discussions and networking related to both amateur radio and applicable scientific fields. Several distinguished speakers have been invited. The 2024 workshop will continue to make headway on topics of past HamSCI meetings, including the use of amateur radio techniques for observing and understanding the physics behind traveling ionospheric disturbances, Sporadic E, the ionospheric response to solar flares and geomagnetic storms, and space weather effects on radio wave propagation. This meeting will also serve as a bi-annual discussion forum for the HamSCI Personal Space Weather Station (PSWS), a project funded through the NSF Aeronomy Distributed Array of Small Instruments (DASI) program. This will be a hybrid workshop with free interactive Zoom participation and live streaming by the Ham Radio 2.0 YouTube channel to ensure broadest accessibility. All presentations will be archived on YouTube and made available through hamsci.org. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.