1. Introduction

During the triennium 1999-2002, URSI Commission G has been active through its Working Groups (WGs) and sponsored symposia and workshops. Early in the triennium the Commission G web site was transferred from http://ulcar.uml.edu/ursi/ to the URSI Website. Later, an electronic mailing list was set up for communicating with people who had expressed an interest in Commission G activities. The mailing list membership is self-managing and the Commission Chair moderates the group. The address is http://www.ips.gov.au/mailman/listinfo/ursi-commission-g. Currently, there are 576 addresses in the mailing list. These were drawn from addresses for people who had attended past URSI Assemblies, or were known to have an interest in Commission G activities.

2. Working Group Reports

The following Working Group reports have been prepared by the Working Group Chairs in cooperation with their co-chairs.

1. G1: Ionosonde Network Advisory Group

Retiring Chair : R. Conkright (USA), Current Chair : T. Bullett, Vice-Chairs : P. Wilkinson (Australia) and J-C. Jodogne (Belgium)

The last three years have seen a great deal of consolidation in INAG. All the older INAG Bulletins have now been scanned and passed through text recognition software, the final product being placed on the INAG Website. The text recognition process has left residual errors in some of the texts, but a lack of resources has meant these errors have not yet all been removed. Plans for indexing all the Bulletins also stalled as a consequence. The complete UAG-23A has also been scanned and a PDF is available of the Website. This document is now out of print. Finally, a set of Australian ionogram scaling training notes was added.

An electronic mailing list was set up for communicating with people who had expressed an interest in INAG activities. The mailing list membership is self-managing and the INAG Vice Chair (Phil Wilkinson) moderates the group. The address is http://www.ips.gov.au/mailman/listinfo/inag-general. Currently, there are 231 email addresses registered in the mailing list.

Ray Conkright, the Chair of INAG, retired from NGDC in April this year. Ray had worked for many years to maintain the visibility of the ionosphere in the World Data Centres and the CD-ROM of hourly ionospheric data is concrete evidence of that work. Ray’s work has ensured that scaled data from ionosondes from around the globe are collected together making a coherent dataset for studying a wide range of ionospheric climatology problems. The full value of this data set will persist for many years to come and be a testimony to one aspect of Ray’s efforts. At the time of his retirement, Ray also retired from the Chair of INAG. On Ray’s suggestion, Dr Terry Bullet, Air Force Research Labs (bullett@plh.af.mil) replaced him as Chair. This change was fully supported Phil Wilkinson, the Chair of Commission G.

INAG wishes to continue as an URSI Working Group in the forthcoming triennium.

2. G.2. Studies of the Ionosphere using Beacon Satellites

Chair : R. Leitinger (Austria), Vice-Chairs : J.A. Klobuchar (USA) and P.V.S. Rama Rao (India)

The Beacon Satellite Group (BSG) is interdisciplinary, servicing science, research, applications, and engineering interests.

The Working Group was active in its traditional fields, namely compilation, exchange and dissemination of information, contact with and exchange of experience with various organisations of relevance (ITU-R study group 3, the European COST Actions 251 and now 271, Augmentation Systems for GPS based satellite navigation, international and national advisory bodies, GPS data retrieval and archiving organisations, and others), providing advise on request. The work was partly carried out by correspondence, and partly through attendance of conferences and other meetings.

Among the most important activities of the BSG are the Beacon Satellite Symposia. After a forerunner organised at the Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie at Lindau/Harz, Germany, in 1970 the series started in 1972 with the first Symposium at Graz/Austria and continued at time intervals between two and four years. It is planned to keep to at least a three years rhythm and have Beacon Satellite Symposia in the year prior to the URSI General Assembly. The next is tentatively planned to be held at the Abdus Salam ICTP at Trieste / Italy.

The Beacon Satellite Symposium 2001 (BSS’01) ranks among the most successful held. The venue was at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA from 4 through 6 June, 2001. Ms. Patricia Doherty (Boston College), who was also the US branch of the program committee, which consisted of the chairman and the co-chairmen of the BSG, and chaired the Local Organising Committee (LOC).

The LOC had the following membership:

Dr. Jules Aarons, Ms. Susan Delay, Dr. M. Patricia Hagan, Dr. Michael Mendillo, Mr. Leo Power, Dr. Cesar Valladares, Boston University; Dr. Santimay Basu, Air Force Geophysics Laboratory; Dr. Anthea Coster, MIT Lincoln Laboratory; and Dr. Ed Fremouw, Northwest Research Associates.

The first session of BSS’01 was "A Tribute to Dr. Jules Aarons in the year of his 80^th Birthday" with an address given by the Co-Chairman of the Beacon Satellite Group, John A. Klobuchar. In the years before the BSG was founded, Dr. Aarons had played an important role in bringing together scientists and engineers interested in beacon satellite studies in the "Joint Satellite Studies Group" and in establishing co-operation with several other research groups. His continuing scientific interests and activities give an outstanding example to the younger generations.

The statistics on the Beacon Symposium are as follows:

Number of participants: 150

Number of countries represented: 24

Number of sessions: 13 (12 oral sessions and 1 poster session)

Number of papers presented: 107 (counting posters)

Number of sponsors: 8 (including URSI)

Number of sponsors with monetary support: 7

For organisational and funding reasons it was convenient to have a Space Weather Workshop (SWW) at Boston College immediately following the BSS’01. On the one hand, this lead to a shorter Beacon Satellite Symposium with sessions in parallel, although, on the other hand, some papers with more general space weather related topics could be shifted to the SWW where they found a partly different audience.

From the beginning there have been two main areas of interest in Beacon Satellite Studies which can be summarised under the key words: "Electron Content" and "Scintillation". With the developments in Ionosphere Tomography using the Global Satellite Navigation Systems (GNNS, presently the US system GPS and its Russian equivalent, GLONASS) and GPS receivers onboard Low Earth Orbit Satellites (LEOs) the "Electron Content" part gained new momentum and new perspectives.

There is now considerable interest in assessment studies for various applications of satellite-to-ground and satellite-to-satellite propagation of L band signals. Very large numbers of GPS receivers are operated by different organisations, many of who lack experience with the ionosphere and plasmasphere propagation effects. The members of the BSG produce only a small fraction of data compared with the very large amount of potentially usable GPS data collected elsewhere. However, the members of the BSG have expertise in the ionosphere and plasmasphere and need to assess so-called "ionosphere products" produced by others, to provide advice, suggestions and even warnings. It is an important task for the BSG to organise assessment studies, to act as a distribution centre for relevant requests and to archive answers of more general interest.

GNSS-LEO occultation is a very important source of ionospheric data but needs further relevant assessment studies. GNSS occultation receivers will be installed simultaneously on several LEO satellites in the near future. The primary purpose is neutral atmosphere research and system development (e.g., climate research, possible data sources for weather prediction systems). These ambitious applications (e.g., to gain stratospheric temperature or tropospheric water vapour profiles) need to include very careful consideration of the residual plasma influences that necessarily remains after removal of the first order influences.

VHF/UHF beacons onboard Low Earth Orbit satellites still exist and it is expected (and hoped) that the NIMS system with three active beacons will stay in operation until a new beacon system is operational. Ground reception of the VHF/UHF beacon signals provides the data for high-resolution ionosphere tomography.

There is a considerable potential for high quality ionosphere and plasmasphere data to be derived from ground and space observation of GNSS signals as well as from advanced retrieval systems for data gained by means of the ground reception of VHF/UHF beacons aboard LEO satellites. However, these "Novel Data Sources" and the relevant data retrieval and preparation procedures need careful testing and comparison with data from established instrumentation.

Recently the need has appeared for high resolution and high accuracy absolute values of vertical and slant electron content, especially in the context of near real-time ionospheric corrections for advanced satellite navigation systems. Other applications (e.g., the use of GNSS signals in surveying) need information on smaller scale wavelike disturbances (mostly, but not exclusively, from Travelling Ionospheric Disturbances).

Reacting to the new challenges, one sub-group on "Ionospheric Tomography" (already mentioned) has been formed at the occasion of the BSS’01 (leaders: Jim Secan and Ed Fremouw) and is working very successfully. Among other activities the sub-group had a data workshop at the Ionospheric Effects Symposium 2002. A sub-group on matters of advanced GNSS-based navigation systems is being organised under the leadership of Patricia Doherty.

The Working Group wishes to continue its activities as an URSI Commission G Working Group in the future and has endorsed its present leadership. Since traditional and new activities are well within the terms of reference of the Working Group, it does not suggest a change of these terms.

The Working Group proposes that the Beacon Symposium 2004 be endorsed as an "URSI Generated Symposium". The tentative location is Trieste / Italy, the tentative host is the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics and Prof. Sandro Radicella will chair the LOC. However, it is more and more difficult to ensure that our Symposia fulfil one very important task, namely to bring young(er) scientists to the meetings and to maintain direct contact at meetings with scientists of all generations from countries and regions with serious lack of travel funds. The small amount of money that may be available from URSI for Symposia is no longer sufficient as "seed money" to help national sources.

3. G.3 Incoherent Scatter

Chair : A.P. van Eyken (Norway), Vice-Chair : W. Swartz (USA)

The work of the URSI Incoherent Scatter Working Group (ISWG) over the last triennium has continued to be dedicated almost exclusively to the co-ordination of the activities of the World’s Incoherent Scatter Radar facilities.

Amongst these activities, the preparation and monitoring of the Co-ordinated World Day programme has been, and continues to be, the over-riding concern of the Working Group. Besides being made available on the Working Group’s WWW site, the Co-ordinated World Day programme is also published each year as part of the International Geophysical Calendar.

The co-ordinated World-day programme has grown over the years to include 21 ‘days’ (1600-1600 UT) of observations in each calendar year. Since co-ordinated experiments are scheduled to start as early as possible on the first day (typically between 1000 and 1300 UT), the actual total number of hours scheduled is somewhat larger than 21*24 hours. For 2003, the total number of ‘days’ seems likely to rise to 22.

All the Incoherent Scatter radars participate in the co-ordinated programme, which forms both a substantial part of the activities of the individual facilities and throws the weight of URSI behind efforts to fund and operate some of the facilities to allow them to take part in the full programme. Over the last triennium, the co-ordinated programme has been supported by the Arecibo, Jicamarca, Millstone Hill, and Sondrestrom radars in the Americas, the MU radar in Japan, the Yrkutsk radar in Russia, the three EISCAT radars in Scandinavia, and the Kharkov radar in the Ukraine. The performance of many of these radars has dramatically improved with the introduction of improved coding and signal processing schemes as well as a number of substantial hardware upgrades. Much of the data collected during these operations are distributed through a variety of databases freely accessible from the WWW.

The original plan for the co-ordinated programme was to encourage operation of all the radars on common days (when other instruments, normally operated irregularly or only in campaign intervals, might also chose to take data) and to assemble long time series of ionospheric observations that would be valuable for the study of long-term trends as well as detailed case studies. In order to assure an adequate distribution of observations, targeted operations aimed at increasing the statistics for poorly represented seasons and activity levels have formed an important part of the programme from its inception and up to the present.

However, operations have been increasingly in demand to support a series of large-scale programmes, including programs such as S-RAMP, and satellite missions, including recent and current operations in support of the CLUSTER and TIMED missions. While these demands have somewhat eroded the even distribution of observations required, efforts are currently underway to redress the balance somewhat.

A further notable development, encouraged and co-ordinated by the ISWG, has seen the introduction of ‘floating’ co-ordinated observing days were it has proved possible to arrange for all the radars to be available to operate for several days at short notice during much longer alert intervals lasting up to about one month. This practice has considerably improved the community’s ability to respond to, and measure effectively during, geomagnetic storm conditions. The ISWG has also provided the infrastructure required to operate some short-notice operations, outside the co-ordinated observing programme, involving smaller groups of instruments.

Operations in the later category have lead to a new initiative this year that recognises the unique roles played by the clusters of incoherent scatter radars at high and low latitudes and the 2003 calendar will introduce a new type of co-ordinated observation interval where the two groups of radars pursue different, but complementary, goals.

It is expected that the next Chairperson will continue these trends and also develop better systems to replace the present ad hoc arrangements for running some, or all, of the radars at short notice to support, for example, measurements in advance of and during major changes in the ionosphere associated with the arrival of geo-effective solar coronal mass ejection material in the vicinity of the Earth. New systems will also be necessary to co-ordinate data taken at a number of facilities which are investigating the possibilities to run for much longer intervals (including continuous operation in some cases) using existing or planned hardware.

The ISWG continues to be an effective and useful tool in co-ordinating the activities of the World’s incoherent scatter radars and it’s role can only be expected to increase together with the demand for short-notice observations and precise monitoring of space weather parameters. These necessary functions are expected to continue as part of the output of this Working Group during the next triennium.

4. G.4 Ionospheric Informatics

Chair : S.M. Radicella (Argentina), Vice-Chair : R. Hanbaba (France)

The work of this working group is now complete. It has been recommended to Commission G that this group should be terminated at the next URSI General Assembly.

5. GF Middle Atmosphere

Co-Chair for Comm. G : J. Röttger (Sweden), Co-Chair for Comm. F : C.H. Liu (China, SRS)

In March 1999 a major session was held at the conference PIERS 1999 (Progress in Electromagnetic Research Symposium) in Taipei, ROC Taiwan, with the title "Radar Applications for Atmosphere and Ionosphere Research", which was convened by the co-chair J Röttger. The symposium was sponsored by several institutions of Taiwan through the involvement of the co-chair C.H. Liu. A special issue of the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, vol. 63. No. 2-3, 2001, with guest-editor J. Röttger and T. B. Jones, resulted from this major session.

In May 1999 the 14th ESA Symposium on European Rocket and Balloon Programs and Related Research was held in Potsdam, Germany, where the scientific program committee was chaired by J Röttger. It included several sessions with papers on applying radio science techniques. Besides the Symposium Proceedings, published by ESA, Summary and Conclusions for Future Research were adopted during this symposium and published by ESA.

In March 2000 the Ninth International Workshop on Technical and Scientific Aspects of MST Radar MST9, combined with the COST76 Final Profiler Workshop, was held in Toulouse, France, under the chairmanship of JR. This resulted in the Proceedings, published by SCOSTEP and MeteoFrance in October 2000, and in the special issue of the journal Annales Geophysicae, vol. 19, No. 8, 2001.

In November 2000 a 2-weeks course was held at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (ICTP) on "Physics of Mesosphere-Stratosphere-Troposphere Interactions with Special Emphasis on MST Radar Techniques", which was also devoted to activities of URSI WG GF1, and J Röttger as lecturer.

In July 2001 the Tenth International EISCAT Workshop was held in Tokyo, Japan. A session and several papers were directed to coupling and research of the middle atmosphere with radio methods.

During three weeks in November and December 2002 the Third International School on Atmospheric Radar, ISAR-3, will be held at the International Center of Theoretical Physics in Trieste. J Röttger is directing this school, which will allow young scientists to become acquainted with the radar and radio techniques used for middle and lower atmosphere research. Financial support has been requested from URSI.

J Röttger is chairing the International Steering Committee of the Tenth Workshop on Technical and Scientific Aspects of MST Radar MST, which will be held in May 2003 in Piura, Peru. Financial support from URSI will be applied for. Preparations for this are part of the URSI WG GF work. A significant part of this workshop will deal with preparations of reports and outlines of new techniques, methods and science for radio/radar studies of the middle and lower atmosphere.

Together with C. Hanuise and C. Lonsdale, J Röttger is co-convening a session of commission G and J at the forthcoming URSI General Assembly in August 2002.

The EISCAT Scientific Association has established a committee on defining the needs and future directions for the coming decades for scientific research of the Earth’s ionosphere, magnetosphere and atmosphere. J Röttger is member in this committee.

In summary, the Working Group GF "Middle Atmosphere" has had a successful triennium and recommends it should continue for another three years period. At the forthcoming Assembly URSI Commission G and F will consider this recommendation.

6. GH.1. Active Experiments in Plasmas

Co-Chair for Commission G : Sa. Basu (USA), Co-Chair for Commission H : T. Leyser (Sweden)

The Working Group GH1 on Active Experiments in Space Plasmas reports very enthusiastic response to its call for papers for this XXVIIth URSI General Assembly. A session entitled, "Ionospheric Modification by High Power Radio Waves: Coupling of Plasma Processes" has been organized that features 11 oral presentations and a further 19 papers will be presented in the poster session.

The Working Group reports continued international co-operation in the field during the period under review (September 1999 to August 2002). Co-operative research has been performed at the Sura, EISCAT and HAARP ionospheric modification facilities in Russia, Norway and USA respectively. At Sura, research has been focused on the spectral features of Stimulated Electromagnetic Emissions (SEE) and the use of SEE as a tool for the study of HF induced nonlinear plasma processes. At Sura, ionospheric heating experiments by X-mode waves following O-mode heating have yielded interesting results on artificial ionospheric turbulence. The HF radiation from the Sura facility has been successfully received at the WIND satellite in the interplanetary medium and significant results have been obtained on focusing, scintillation, frequency broadening and distortion of radiation pattern. At EISCAT, experiments on HF pump induced electron heating and enhanced airglow emission have been performed and the emission has been located by the use of multi-station airglow imaging system. The features of the distribution of Langmuir turbulence caused by HF heating continue to be investigated at EISCAT using the UHF and VHF radars. The HF CUTLASS radar is studying the characteristics of decameter scale irregularities caused by the EISCAT heater. The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) has built a new ionospheric interaction facility in Gakona, Alaska for the study of Radio Science and plasma physics. The high power HF transmitters at HAARP currently operate at a level of 960 kW and the facility is co-located with an impressive set of radio, radar and optical diagnostics. Since the last General Assembly in 1999, HAARP has conducted 18 research campaigns with significant results. Research has been conducted in areas such as, ELF/VLF wave generation in the ionosphere, SEE, field aligned artificial airglow emission, propagation experiments with the WIND satellite and the study of HF interaction with Polar Mesospheric Summer Echoes (PMSE). These results provide a promising start for the HAARP facility that is currently only 25 per cent complete.

The group wishes to continue as an URSI Working Group in the forthcoming triennium.

7. GH.2. Computer Experiments, Simulation and Analysis of Wave Plasma Processes

Co-Chair for Commission G : H. Thiemann (Germany), Co-Chair for Commission H : H. Matsumoto (Japan)

No report was received for this Working Group at the time this report was prepared.

8. GH.3. Wave and Turbulence Analysis

Co-Chair for Commission G : A.W. Wernik (Poland), Co-Chair for Commission H : F. Lefeuvre (France)

This WG was initiated in 1972. The objective was to organize sessions and symposia around the presentation of new developments in signal analysis and their applications to studies of waves in plasmas. The WG changed several times its format, name and leaders. Initially, it was considered that there was not enough new material in signal analysis to have a big event at each GA. It is the reason why we used to alternate a regular scientific session with a symposium. Since 1996 we have regular sessions at each General Assembly and special events (symposia or summer school) in between two General Assemblies.

The Working Group was actively involved in a School "Analysis Techniques for Space Plasma Data" (La Londe-Les Maures, France, 8-13 October 2001). The School, hosted by CNRS, was co-convened by T. Dudok de Wit (LPCE, Orleans, France) and J. Vogt (IUB, Bremen, Germany). Support was provided by URSI, CNRS, CNES, COSPAR, ESA, ISSI-Switzerland and others. The objective of this school was to review the basic and more advanced methods for analysis of spacecraft plasma data. The attendance was limited to 70 participants, but the number of applications was much larger. Invited experts presented nine tutorial lectures, and other participants gave 16 short talks. Participants have had an access to computers during the computer sessions. The round-table discussion concluded the school. The School was a great success and showed a need for this kind of activities in the future. More information and copies of some presentations can be found at: http://web.cnrs-orleans.fr/~weblpce/semin_stages/colloques/la-londe/

At the General Assembly of URSI in Maastricht the Working Group organizes an intercommission HGJC Session on "Analysis Methods for Plasma Waves and Turbulence". This session is dedicated to data analysis techniques in the radio-scientific study of space plasmas, on scales from interstellar down to ionospheric. The group wishes to continue as an URSI Working Group.

9. URSI-COSPAR on International Reference Ionosphere (IRI)

The 1999 IRI workshop was held from August 9 to 12 at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Center for Atmospheric Research (UMLCAR) organized locally by B. Reinisch and supported financially by URSI, COSPAR, NSF and UMLCAR. 47 participants attended the meeting representing 14 countries. The 56 papers were divided into the following sessions: Ray Tracing, D Region, Measurements and Comparisons, Temperature and Ion composition, Topside and Plasmasphere, Total electron Content, Improvements and New Inputs, Drift Data and Model, Evaluation of IRI and Other Models, Applications. Selected papers from the meeting are published in Advances in Space Research, Volume 27, Number 1, 2001. For a summary see: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/space/model/ionos/iri/iri_99_report.html.

A special 2-day session on modeling the topside and plasmasphere was organized by the IRI group during the 33^nd COSPAR scientific assembly in Warsaw, Poland, 12-19 July, 2000. Modeling efforts were presented based on data from ionosondes, incoherent scatter radars, and on satellite data from Interkosmos 19, SROSS C2, ISIS 1, 2, Magion 3, 5, Active, ISS-b, and Hinotori 29 papers from this session were published in Advances in Space Research Volume 29, Number 6, 2002. The summary report of the meeting is at http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/space/model/ionos/iri/irinfo/irinfo_19.html .

In 2001 the annual IRI workshop was held at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE) in Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil from June 25 to 29 organized locally by J. H. A. Sobral, M.A. Abdu, and I.S. Batista. It was attend by about 60 scientists including representatives from USA, Russia, India, Peru, South Africa, Japan, Spain, Argentina, U.K., Czech Republic, Chile, and Brazil. 75 papers were presented in 8 oral sessions and in 1 poster session with the following titles: The Equatorial Anomaly Region, Total Electron Content and Topside, Description of Ionospheric Variability, Modeling the Low Latitude Ionosphere, Ion composition, Scintillation and Spread-F, Representation of F Peak and Bottomside Parameters, New Data and Model Inputs, and Applications. Financial support was provided by COSPAR, URSI, the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), INPE, the Fundação deAmparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), the Sociedade Brasileira de Geofísica (SBGf), and the Fundação Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superios (CAPES). Selected papers and posters from this workshop are being considered for publication in a dedicated issue of Advances of Space Research. See http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/space/model/ionos/iri/iri_01_report.html for summary and details of this meeting.

Several new members were accepted into the IRI working Group during this time period including Prof Kouris from (University of Thessaloniki, Greece), X. Huang (UMLCAR, USA), L.-A. McKinnell (University of Grahamstown, South Africa), V. Truhlik (Czech Republic), V. K. Depuev (IZMIRAN, Russia), M. Abdu (INPE, Brazil). IRI continues to publish a quarterly newsletter (K. Oyama, editor) and provide model updates through an electronic mailer (more than 400 subscribers). The IRI home page is at http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/space/model/ionos/iri.html.

1. Other Working Groups

1. Sponsored Meetings

1. Mode A Sponsorship

1. Mode B Sponsorship

Mode B sponsored meetings received seed funding from Commission G, and other Commissions in some cases. Brief summary reports follow.

1. MST-9 / COST-76 Meeting

Full report: The Radio Science Bulletin, June 2000, P38.

The Ninth International Workshop on Technical and Scientific Aspects of MST Radar (MST-9) combined with the COST-76 Final Profiler Workshop and was held at the International Conference Centre of Meteo France in Toulouse, March 13-18, 2000. 156 participants attended the workshop from 27 countries and a total of 195 papers were presented, 76 of which were poster presentations.

2. ISEA 2000, International Symposium on Equatorial Aeronomy

Full report: The Radio Science Bulletin, December 2000, P26.

The tenth International Symposium on Equatorial Aeronomy was held in Antalya, Turkey, May 17 – 24, 2000. Over 110 scientists from five continents attended. Young scientists and scientists from developing countries made up a significant fraction of the attendees.

3. COSPAR / IRI Session

Full report: The Radio Science Bulletin, June 2001, P20.

The 33^rd COSPAR Congress was held in Warsaw, Poland, 16 – 23 July 2000. The IRI session, held during COSPAR, was a 2-day meeting reviewing topside ionosphere and plasmasphere modelling with special emphasis on improvements of the IRI in these regions.

4. IRI Workshop Brazil

Full report: The Radio Science Bulletin, December 2001, P23.

The 2001 IRI Workshop was held at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais in São José doe Campos, Brazil, June 25 to 29, 2001. About 60 scientists from over 12 countries attended it. The 75 papers were presented in eight oral sessions and one poster session.

5. 2001 Asia-Pacific Radio Science Conference (AP-RASC 01)

Full report: The Radio Science Bulletin, (not yet published at the time of preparing this report).

The AP-RASC 01 Conference was held in Tokyo at Chuo University, 31 July – 06 August. 2001. It was the first in a planned series of conferences on radio science in the South East Asian region. Roughly 700 people registered for the conference, from 34 countries with 48 young scientists from 17 countries/regions, whose travelling expenses were partly granted by the Conference Organizing Committee. A total of 599 regular papers were presented (oral: 404, poster 195) in 86 sessions. The Commission G sessions were attended by roughly 40 to 60 people per session. This strong local support for the meeting was most heartening and hopefully will extend to future RASC meetings in the region.

6. 34^th COSPAR Meeting