Special issue “VLF/ELF remote sensing of ionospheres and magnetospheres”

Graphical Abstract

The present collection of papers is the result of collaborations and discussions fostered in the 9th VLF/ELF Remote Sensing of Ionospheres and Magnetospheres (VERSIM) Workshop, which was held successfully as a virtual meeting during the week of 16–20 November 2020. The VERSIM working group is an international group of scientists interested in studying the behavior of the magnetosphere and ionosphere by means of Extremely Low Frequency (ELF: 300–3 kHz) and Very Low Frequency (VLF: 3–30 kHz) radio waves, both naturally and artificially generated. We had 59 invited oral papers and 83 poster papers presented during 10 sessions consisting of morning sessions (9–12 am JST) and evening sessions (9–12 pm JST) with 174 registered participants from 20 countries. Two years after the 9th VERSIM meeting the 10th VERSIM Workshop was held as a hybrid meeting, online and in-person at Sodankylä, Finland in November 2022.

We solicited papers for the special issue of the 9th VERSIM Workshop, and currently have 13 papers in it. Among them, we asked Daniel Baker to write a review paper (Baker 2021) summarizing the achievements by the NASA Radiation Belt Storm Probes program (renamed the “Van Allen Probes” mission in November 2012). We received 5 other papers (Foster et al. 2021; Martinez-Calderon et al. 2021; Parrot et al. 2022; Bezděková et al. 2022; Briand et al. 2022; Redoplado et al. 2022) related to spacecraft and grand-based observations of VLF/ELF waves. We also asked David Nunn to write a paper (Nunn 2021) describing the detailed technical issues surrounding the Vlasov Hybrid Simulation code which he has been developing for more than 30 years to reproduce whistler-mode chorus emissions. We also received 4 other papers (Grach et al. 2021; Liu et al. 2021; Fujiwara et al. 2022; Katoh et al. 2023) on particle simulations describing wave-particle interactions and related particle dynamics taking place in the background dipole magnetic field. We also have a paper by Kikukawa et al. (2022) on developing compact plasma particle detectors for use on board future satellite missions.

We would like to thank the reviewers of the articles in the special issue. Their names are listed below in alphabetical order: Anton Artemyev, Stas Barabash, Mark A. Clilverd, Morris Cohen, Andrei Demekhov, Philip Erickson, Hitoshi Fujiwara, Essam Ghamry, Miroslav Hanzelka, Liming He, Yasuhide Hobara, Yuto Katoh, Janos Lichtenberger, Lann-Yeng Liu, Jyrki Manninen, Hiroyo Ohya, Michael Rycroft, David Shklyar, S. Sripathi, Danny Summers, Jicheng Sun, Bruce Tsurutani, Shoichiro Yokota.