The Baron Marcel Nicolet Medal 2019

Professor Delores J. Knipp

Pr. Delores Knipp is an outstanding ambassador for space weather, and has been a leader in the science, teaching, and dissemination of space weather research for decades. She has made major contributions to our understanding of the ionosphere and thermosphere and to the intimate relation between these two co-located domains. In parallel, Delores has also been developing and presenting space weather courses for undergraduate students, and mentoring numerous graduate students and post-docs. She takes mentoring very seriously.

Delores has recently completed a five-year term as Editor-in-Chief of the American Geophysical Union’s Space Weather journal. During her term, she has expanded the international reach of the journal, creating an international editorial board and engaging with authors and reviewers from around the world. She also contributed to the wider space weather community in two other areas: opening up underused datasets, and research on historical space weather events.

She has worked tirelessly to revive relevant data acquired by space weather sensors on the US DMSP satellites – a challenging task to clean and verify data that contained important information on Poynting flux and electron precipitation, and making them available to users around the world. She created an important resource, one that has led to several discoveries and one that is a great example of the importance of data preservation in the space weather field.

Delores has undertaken studies of several historically large space weather events and encouraged and supported others around the world to do the same. This is an important area of study since it gives insights into what adverse space weather looks like, and its potential impacts on technology and on human society. Delores recently published papers on the 1967 and 1972 events, she looked beyond the space weather community by gaining important insights from discussions with users affected by those events, a timely collection of what we may call “living history”. She has also encouraged other recent work on the major space weather events that occurred in 1770, 1859, 1909 and 1921.