Dear Colleagues

We are happy to announce the 2023 contest for the International Space Weather and Space Climate Medals. The medal recipients will be announced during the Medal Ceremony on 20th November 2023 at the European Space Weather Week. Each winner will be invited to give a 20-minute lecture on their research in a dedicated session.

All three prizes are prestigious recognitions of the recipients’ major contributions in the field of space weather and space climate. Medal recipients’ achievements must have been documented in peer-review journals or book chapters, or must be a technological contribution that has led to a fully implemented and documented new space weather or space climate capability. Medal recipients’ work must be relevant to space weather and space climate. The work must also be internationally recognized.

In addition to the above common criteria, there are the following specific requirements for each of the three medals:

The Kristian Birkeland Medal for Space Weather and Space Climate

The recipient of the Kristian Birkeland Medal must have demonstrated an ability to combine basic and applied research to develop useful space weather and/or space climate products used outside the research community, and/or across scientific research disciplines. The work must have led to a better physical comprehension of solar-terrestrial phenomena related to space weather and/or space climate, to a significant improvement of space weather and/or space climate modeling, or to a new generation of instruments or tools.

The Baron Marcel Nicolet Medal for Space Weather and Space Climate

The recipient of the Baron Marcel Nicolet Medal must have demonstrated an ability to bind the space weather and space climate community in a spirit of peace and friendship, to educate the younger generations within and outside the space weather and space climate community, to go beyond the research community and address larger audiences, and/or to serve the space weather and space climate community.

The Alexander Chizhevsky Medal for Space Weather and Space Climate

The Alexander Chizhevsky Medal is awarded to an early-career scientist in recognition of outstanding achievements in space weather and space climate with innovative approaches. The nominee must be an early-career scientist within eight years of receiving their PhD (or equivalent) degree at the time of nomination. This 8-year period may be increased at the discretion of the Awards Committee to include the duration of any career breaks (such as parental leave) after obtaining the PhD degree.

How to nominate?

In order to nominate a person for one of the International Space Weather and Space Climate Medals, please send one single pdf document which includes:

Your full name and professional address.

The full name and professional address of the person that you nominate.

Which of the three medals you nominate the person for (only one medal type is allowed for each nominee).

Reasons for the nomination (two pages maximum). Please make sure that these reasons relate to space weather and space climate and fulfil the criteria listed above.

A full CV of the nomineep

Letters of support from two colleagues, preferably outside your own or the candidate's institution. You may also include those two colleagues as co-signatories on the nomination proposal. For the Chizhevsky prize, a recommendation letter from the PhD advisor (in case the PhD supervisor is not the person submitting the nomination) is recommended.

Up to five references (journal articles, prizes, patents, etc.) of the nominee's work.

Self-nominations are not allowed. Any individual can only nominate one person for a medal. The medal committee members cannot nominate or be nominated.

Send the documents by email to: medals -at- lists.eswan.eu

The deadline for the nominations: 5th September 2023.

Composition of the Medal Committee in 2023

Previous winners:

Bruce T. Tsurutani (2019 Birkeland)
Delores Knipp (2019 Nicolet)
Jiajia Liu (2019 Chizhevsky): vice-chair
Richard Horne (2020 Birkeland)
Madhulika Guhathakurta (2020 Nicolet)
Mateja Dumbovic (2020 Chizhevsky)
Kazunari Shibata (2021 Birkeland)
Maria Kusnetsova (2021 Nicolet)
Martin A. Reiss (2021 Chizhevsky)

Ex-officio members:

Ronald van der Linden: Representative of E-SWAN.
Mario M. Bisi: Representative of the ESWW Programme Committee.
Ilya Usoskin: Representative of the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate.

The Medal Committee is chaired by Andrea Opitz.

Kristian Birkeland

Olaf Kristian Bernhard Birkeland was born in Oslo, Norway, on 13th December 1867 and died in Tokyo on 15th June 1917. He was appointed professor of Physics at The Royal Frederik University in Kristiania, near the end of the 19th century.
His life spans a watershed period when insights about electricity and magnetism, codified by Maxwell in the mid-19th century, evolved from theoretical curiosities to become the basis for modern electronic technology as well as our understanding of the geospace environment.
His mathematical training provided a superb foundation for developing the first general solution of Maxwell’s equations and energy transfer in 1895, by means of electromagnetic waves. He continued to investigate the properties of electromagnetic waves in conductors and wave propagation through space. From 1895 to 1917 his basic-science research focused on geomagnetic disturbances, auroras, solar-terrestrial relations and cosmology. Birkeland was gifted with a wonderfully inventive mind that bubbled with ideas and sought to investigate any and all aspects of the physical sciences. His main work regarding auroras and geomagnetic disturbances is summarized in The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902-1903; an 801-page monograph.
From 1903 to 1906 Birkeland diverted much of his attention toward applied physics and technological development. His primary motive for engaging in such activities was to generate the funds he needed to support his ambitious research projects and to build a modern research laboratory whose cost greatly exceeded what the University’s budget could afford. All together Birkeland developed sixty patents in ten different subject areas. In one field, the production of agricultural fertilizers, he earned large sums of money. He invented the plasma arc leading to the Birkeland-Eyde method for industrial nitrogen fixation for synthesizing artificial fertilizers, and the founding of Norsk Hydro that today remains one of Norway’s largest industrial enterprises, stands as a living tribute to his genius. Eight nominations for the Nobel Prize, attest to the high esteem in which contemporary scientists regarded Kristian Birkeland.

Baron Marcel Nicolet

Baron Marcel Nicolet (1912–1996) was a Belgian geophysicist and astrophysicist, specialized in solar ultraviolet radiation and stratospheric chemistry, who played an essential role in the birth of space aeronomy.
Amongst his most remarkable scientific achievements, we cite the explanation, on a purely theoretical basis, of the ionospheric D-region formation process. He postulated that the solar radiation in the hydrogen Lyman-alpha wavelength could penetrate into the Earth’s mesosphere, leading to the ionization of nitrogen oxide. He was also the first person to clarify the effect of atmospheric drag acting upon the first man-made satellites orbiting the Earth. He played a decisive role in the determination of photo-dissociation and photo-ionization in the atmosphere, predicting the presence of a belt of helium around the Earth and the presence of NO, NO2, HNO3, HO2 and H2O2 in the atmosphere before any of these were measured. For these achievements, he was bestowed with the Bowie medal, one of the highest distinctions of the American Geophysical Union, after having received already several other scientific distinctions.
Marcel Nicolet was one of the founders of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). He participated in the creation of the Commission préparatoire d'Études et de Recherches Spatiales (COPERS) that afterwards led to the foundation of the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) and the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO), forerunners of the European Space Agency. He was one of the main promoters of the International Geophysical Year and became its secretary general. In his home country Belgium, Marcel Nicolet was the founder of the Belgian Institute of Space Aeronomy in 1964. He was a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium and a professor at the Universities of Liège and Brussels. He received the title of Baron in 1987.

Alexander Chizhevsky

Alexander Chizhevsky was born in 1897 in the town of Ciechanowiec in the Grodno region of the Russian Empire (now Poland). He was an outstanding interdisciplinary scientist, a biophysicist who founded “heliobiology” which is the study of the effect of the sun on biology and the "aero-ionization" which is the study of the effects of the ionization of air on biological entities. He was also noted for his work in "cosmobiology", biological rhythms and hematology." He may be most notable for his use of historical research techniques (historiometry) to link the 11-year solar cycle, Earth’s climate and the mass activity of people.
Chizhevsky is recognized as the founder of Sun-Earth research, having proved that solar activity has an effect on many terrestrial phenomena. Chizhevsky proposed that not only did geomagnetic storms resulting from sunspot-related solar flares affect electrical usage, plane crashes, epidemics and grasshopper infestations, but human mental life and activity. Chizhevsky proposed that the eleven-year peaks in sunspot activity influence human history, triggering humans to act en masse upon existing grievances and complaints through revolts, revolutions, civil wars and wars between nations.
Chizhevsky’s ideas were not in line with Soviet ideology. In 1942 he was arrested and spent eight years in Gulag. In 1950 he was allowed to live peacefully in Karaganda, but was rehabilitated only in 1958.
Chizhevsky was also a marked landscape painter and the author of hundreds of poems. Chizhevsky died in Moscow in 1964. An "In memoriam" in the International Journal of Biometeorology stated that he had "carved new paths and approaches to the vast expanse of unexplored fields." He is buried in the Pyatnickoe cemetery in Moscow with a headstone featuring an engraved carving representing the Sun. The Chizhevsky Science Memorial Cultural Center opened in Kaluga, Russia in 2000 in the home where Chizhevsky lived and worked for nearly 15 years. In December 2012 a monument to Alexander Chizhevsky was built in Kaluga as well.