This special section provides a collection of papers regarding the 2013 Equatorial Ionospheric Sounding Rocket Campaign from Kwajalein Atoll. In April/May 2013, a total of four sounding rockets were launched from the Kwajalein Atoll as part of a joint campaign focused on equatorial ionospheric dynamics. The Equatorial Vortex Experiment (EVEX) was designed to provide simultaneous E and F Region measurements to examine the evening pre-reversal vortex and its role as a controlling factor in the development of equatorial spread-F.The Metal Oxide Samarium Cloud (MOSC) experiment provided comprehensive diagnostics of an artificially created ion plasma cloud through the release of samarium vapor in the upper atmosphere.
This special issue provides a collection of papers presented at the "2016 URSI Asia-Pacific Radio Science Conference" (URSI AP-RASC 2016) held in Seoul, South Korea on August 21-25, 2016, and includes invited papers (original and review articles) and contributed papers (original articles). All participants in URSI AP-RASC 2016 who presented papers are eligible to submit.
This special issue reports progress and recent advances in radio science research, ranging from fundamental theories to various applications, and covers the areas related to all the URSI Commissions A to K.
Suggested topics include: electromagnetic metrology, fields and waves, radio communication systems and signal processing, electronics and photonics, electromagnetic environment and interference, wave propagation and remote sensing, ionospheric radio and propagation, waves in plasmas, radio astronomy, and electromagnetics in biology and medicine. It is to be noted that invited papers are based on invitations by the organizers.
This special issue provides a collection of papers presented at the "2016 URSI Commission B International Symposium on Electromagnetic Theory" (URSI EMTS 2016) held in Espoo, Finland on August 14-18, 2016, and will include invited papers (original and review articles) and contributed papers (original articles). This special issue will report progress and recent advances in the area of URSI Commission B (Fields and Waves), and cover the following topics:
- Electromagnetic theory (analytical and semi-analytical methods, mathematical modeling, canonical problems, scattering and diffraction, inverse scattering and imaging)
- Computational methods (integral equation methods, partial differential equation methods, high frequency and hybrid methods, fast solvers and high-order methods, time domain techniques)
- Materials and wave-material interaction (metamaterials and metasurfaces, plasmonics and nanoelectromagnetics, electromagnetic bandgaps and other periodic structures, optical devices, EMC and EMI, bioelectromagnetics)
- Antennas and propagation (multiband and wideband antennas, antenna arrays and MIMOs, wireless communication systems, guided waves and structures, random media and rough surfaces)
- Other topics (history of electromagnetics, education in electromagnetics)
The goal of this special issue is to summarize recent concerted efforts in 3D cloud modeling and 3D radiative transfer (RT). Much of the material to be published was presented at a special session at the 2017 JpGU-AGU Joint Assembly in Chiba, Japan. Fourier scaling and heterogeneity parameters in clouds are surveyed. The impact of a delta-four-stream RT scheme on cloud radiative effects is assessed. Two papers discuss ice cloud horizontal and/or vertical heterogeneity effects on passive retrievals at various resolutions. 3D cloud radiative effects are investigated using Monte Carlo and related to A-Train data, with linkage to cloud morphology. Another study focuses on unmixing clouds and aerosols in large-footprint hyper-angular spectro-polarimetric signals. These topics are at the cutting-edge of the field, and will serve as future reference.
Special collection organizers:
Noah Petro, NASA
Special collection organizers:
Simone Silvestro, National Institute for Astrophysics
Special thanks to editors Anton Artemyev, Jay Albert, Delores Knipp (Editor-in-Chief, Space Weather), Michael Liemohn (Editor-in-Chief, JGR Space Physics), and T. Paul O'Brien for their thoughtful contributions.
We invite you to also check out the National Academies of Sciences' 60th anniversary celebration of the Explorer 1 mission and the associated discovery of the Earth’s radiation belts at https://vimeo.com/album/4962816. You can also read an Editors' Vox by Dan Baker and Lou Lanzerotti reflecting on the 60th anniversary event and the scientific insights gained from Explorer I and subsequent missions: https://eos.org/editors-vox/earths-radiation-belts-celebrating-six-decades-of-discovery.
Recent advances in photonics, nano-optics, graphene-based technologies, and millimeter-wave/terahertz communications have increased the need for accurate full-wave electromagnetic (EM) solvers. While integral-equation formulations play a prominent role because they inherently satisfy radiation conditions and involve unknowns defined over finite domains, usually the discretization schemes adopted do not guarantee numerical convergence and require validation against analytical, experimental, or asymptotic results to establish correctness. Guaranteed-convergence methods overcome these issues by ensuring that the approximate solution obtained by the discretization scheme converges to the exact solution as the truncation order increases. They provide highly accurate, physically reliable, computationally efficient solutions free from spurious effects, thus enabling the analysis of critical EM structures and complex physical phenomena, while also serving as benchmark tools for validating general-purpose EM solvers.
This collection aims to provide a structured forum for interaction among researchers developing guaranteed-convergence methods in EM applications, fostering scientific exchange and stimulating new collaborations. It is also conceived as a comprehensive compendium of the current state of the art, serving as a foundation and catalyst for future methodological and theoretical advances. Finally, it aims to demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of these methods for addressing emerging, technically challenging EM problems crucial to future scientific and technological advancements. As such, it is expected to serve as a valuable reference for researchers interested in these timeless challenges.
Special collection organizers:
Simone Silvestro, INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte
Tim Titus, USGS
Myriam Francesca Stelletti, Università di Sassari
Giulia Cossu, Università di Sassari
Daniele Sechi, Università di Cagliari
Gabriele Franzese, INAF OACN
Giuseppe Mongelluzzo, INAF OACN