March 26, 2021
THE 44rd ANNUAL APATITY SEMINAR “PHYSICS OF AURORAL PHENOMENA”

From 15 to 19 March 2021, the 44th Apatity Seminar “Physics of Auroral Phenomena” was held, annually organized by the Polar Geophysical Institute (Apatity). Due to restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the workshop was held online. More than a hundred people took an active part in it. Among them were 50 scientists from other institutions and cities of Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Irkutsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Yakutsk). At least half of the participants, as usual, were young scientists. The seminar was attended by representatives of 6 Russian universities and 14 research institutes. Among the speakers were also eleven representatives of foreign research institutes (from Argentina, Bulgaria, India, USA, Czech Republic, Japan). Several foreign scientists (from Brazil, India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Finland) participated in the seminar as listeners. This broad international presence was made possible by the online format of the conference, which was featured in the SCOSTEP newsletter.

67 oral and 58 poster presentations were presented at the seminar. The seminar was devoted to the discussion of the latest results obtained by Russian and foreign scientists in the field of the study of geophysical processes that are most intensely manifested at the latitudes of the auroral and subauroral zones.

The seminar was held in the following sections:

1. Storms and substorms
2. Fields, currents, particles in the magnetosphere
3. Waves, wave-particle interaction
4. Sun, solar wind, cosmic rays
5. Ionosphere and upper atmosphere
6. Lower atmosphere, ozone
7. Heliobiosphere

The organization of the seminar was supported by a grant from the international SCOSTEP / PRESTO program. The grant funds were used to pay for expanded access to the Zoom conference, the work of the Spatialchat space for discussion of poster presentations and general discussions, the reservation of DOI indices for the collection of the seminar proceedings, the creation and maintenance of the seminar Internet resources and the purchase of a separate computer for processing and storing seminar materials and providing access to them.