GRAPE Expert Group Report 2020 Popular

GRAPE (GNSS Research and Application for Polar Environment) 2018-2020 Report

Expert Group of the Physical Science/Geosciences Groups

Person Responsible: Giorgiana De Franceschi

Summary

GRAPE was born in 2012 and it is a joint Physical Science and Geoscience group. In the last two years the group efforts have been addressed to organize a summer school, meetings, scientific sessions at SCAR2020 OSC and URSI GASS2020 Conference, to coordinate polar (Arctic and Antarctic) experimental campaign, to manage data, archive, and data base.  The group worked to enlarge the scientific and technological issues within Solar Terrestrial interactions and Space Weather, including the interaction between neutral and ionized atmosphere, mainly based on Radio Science. This action has been concluded and a new Proposal Planning Group named RESOURCE (has been recently submitted to SCAR for consideration by the EXCOMM and SCAR delegates. The initial core membership includes 29 members from 18 Countries, representing the physical sciences and the geosciences. The proposed SRP, taking advantage of the experience of GRAPE, aims to gather the communities that investigate the polar atmosphere, with particular reference to Antarctica but with a bi-polar perspective, by means of radio probes into a common shared initiative. The scope is to improve the current understanding of the Antarctic atmosphere by sharing the expertise and the experience achieved by several scientific teams in the world, thus facilitating the advancement in the field and avoiding any duplication of activities already in action.

Due to the pandemic COVID 19 and the cancelled SCAR2020, we do not know if the PPG RESOURCE will be considered to start within 2020. If not, GRAPE (planned to be embedded in the PPG) would continue its activity until the next SCAR2022.

The remaining funds 2020 (4250USD from PS and GS) were to be spend to support 2 ECRs presenting a paper at SCAR2020 (session1&11) and 2 registration fees for attenders from the GRAPE community. We would like to have the possibility to spend the 2020 funds allocated to GRAPE within 2021-2022.

This report is submitted to both Physical Science and Geosciences Groups Officers.