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Congratulations to Kristin!
Kristin Pratscher completed her oral exam for her PhD on the 16th of September at Victoria University of Wellington, with Malcolm Ingham and Wiebke Heise in attendance. It all went smoothly, and she only has minor corrections to make to her thesis. In Malcolm’s words:
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The Solar Tsunamis team at IAGA/IASPEI 2025
The IAGA / IASPEI Joint Scientific Meeting 2025 was held in Lisbon, Portugal from 31 August to 5 September 2025. Most of the University of Otago Solar Tsunamis team presented talks and posters at the conference about various aspects of the programme, including working with industry partners, the MANA magnetometer network, the outreach designed by…
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MBIE Endeaviour Fund awarded to Solar Tsunamis “Next Generation”
Out of 154 proposals submitted to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Endeavour Fund in 2025, 19 were awarded funding. One of these was the University of Otago Department of Physics project – Solar tsunamis: Next-generation space weather prediction and response for New Zealand. (This proposal is known to the Solar Tsunamis team as…
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NZ leads world in solar storm preparedness, says ex-NASA centre boss
Dr Michelle Thaller, who has just retired from NASA after 27 years, visited Dunedin as a special guest of the New Zealand International Science Festival in June – July 2025. While she was visiting she caught up with the Solar Tsunamis project at our 2025 Annual Programme Meeting, and spoke to 1News about New Zealand’s…
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Solar Tsunamis Year 5 Annual Programme Meeting
Between 24-26 June 2025, Otago hosted the Solar Tsunamis project team’s final annual programme meeting. All the details of the meeting are available on our Meetings page. From the Sciences at University of Otago Facebook page: The Solar Tsunamis programme is led by Physics Professor Craig Rodger (in front row at left – always known…
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Solar Tsunamis at Parliament House
On the 26th of March, the Solar Tsunamis showcase was installed in the Banquet Hall at Parliament House in Wellington, hosted by Scott Willis MP. A number of MPs and stakeholders were invited to a reception event with speeches by Scott, Craig Rodger, Marijn Kouwenhoven from Tūhura Otago Museum, and Andrew Renton from Transpower. The…
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Space Weather photography exhibition opens at Lloyd’s of London
In early March Lloyd’s of London had a series of space weather information events. Craig Rodger was asked to attend these to provide information on the risk to electricity networks and supply. One of the events was the launch of the “Life in the Sun’s Atmosphere: From Disruption to Resilience” photography exhibition by Max Alexander, in Lloyd’s London HQ.…
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Second Injection Campaign
For more detailed background information about the Solar Tsunamis Injection Campaigns, please see the post about our first Injection Campaign, conducted in January 2023. The second injection campaign took place in early January 2025 using the High Voltage DC link (HVDC) and the substation earth grid at Haywards, Wellington. The team members present included Andrew…
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Craig’s “big trip”!
During much of October and some of November this year, Craig went around the world in 27 days – first visiting Christchurch for the 2024 National Lifeline Utilities Forum; then to College Park in Maryland for the 2024 Workshop on Geomagnetically Induced Currents; then to London to discuss Solar Tsunamis research work with space weather-linked…
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A spectacular night for auroras
On Friday the 11th of October 2024, several of the magnetometers in the Solar Tsunamis MANA network recorded a very strong geomagnetic disturbance in the wake of a large Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) emitted from the Sun a few days before. The plots below show the strength of the horizontal magnetic field during the storm…
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The showcase visits Raetihi Marae
It has been a very busy year for the Solar Tsunamis showcase and the Tūhura Otago Museum team. After being installed in the Papakura Museum in South Auckland, the exhibition and planetarium film then travelled to Raetihi, the hometown of former Solar Tsunamis outreach coordinator Toni Hoeta. Wiebke Heise from GNS Science and Kristin Pratscher from…
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Solar Tsunamis meeting with Firstgas – 2024
On 19-20 of August, the Solar Tsunamis team had their annual meeting with Firstgas in New Plymouth. Malcolm Ingham and Tim Divett from Victoria University of Wellington have been working closely with Firstgas to model the response of gas pipeline network electrical systems to Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GICs) caused by space weather, and they shared…
