PREFACE

Welcome to the SuperDARN 2000 Proceedings.

The Annual SuperDARN Meetings are an essential part of the SuperDARN program and the Australian TIGER Consortium was pleased and honoured to host the Year 2000 Meeting at Beechworth from 22 - 29 May. It was certainly quite a challenge for us to host the meeting so soon after TIGER became operational because, just as some other groups have experienced, more and more government regulations impact on such projects, causing significant extra work and delays as additional procedures are developed to deal with new regulations. Nevertheless, hosting SuperDARN 2000 was a very rewarding and enjoyable experience for our team.

While the Annual SuperDARN Meetings have evolved, becoming larger and covering more science topics, they still preserve an informality that provides a good environment for people to meet and discuss their work with colleagues. The nature of the SuperDARN Proceedings has also evolved, however, the emphasis remains on communicating information without the effort required to do so becoming prohibitive. This year, in keeping with former meetings, the material presented as slides or overheads has been collected from each speaker. An opportunity has also been given for authors to provide a more complete paper, an initiative that began with last year's Proceedings. The main change for this year is that the Workshop Proceedings is being published on CDROM with the expectation that this provides the Workshop material in a more flexible and useful format.

On Monday 29th May, immediately after the SuperDARN 2000 Workshop, Professor Michael Osborne, Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe University, officially opened TIGER at the Bruny Island site. It was quite an occasion and it was great to have Dr Ray Greenwald, Leader of SuperDARN, and Mr Paul Johnson, from RLM Systems Pty Ltd, participate formally in the Opening Ceremonies. I also very much appreciated the fact that several other SuperDARN PIs were able to be present as well. We have taken the opportunity to include on the CDROM some photographs and a video taken during the TIGER opening.

Many people contributed to the success of the SuperDARN 2000 Workshop and I thank them for their efforts. In particular, I would like to specifically thank John Devlin, Jim Whittington and Phil Wilkinson. John for leading the actual construction, establishment and commissioning of TIGER and for his leading role in the development of the SuperDARN 2000 Workshop program. Jim for his magnificent effort in organising the activities of the Workshop. I am sure everybody appreciated the work that he did to make the whole SuperDARN 2000 Workshop and experience to remember. And Phil for undertaking the task of producing the Proceedings on CDROM and doing it so capably.

Finally I would like to thank the sponsors of the SuperDARN 2000 Workshop, RLM Systems Pty Ltd, IPS Radio & Space Services, the Australian Institute of Physics and La Trobe University. Each contributed in several essential ways but I particularly want to thank RLM for including the wonderful dinner as part of their sponsorship, IPS Radio & Space Services for their contribution to the production of the Proceedings on CDROM and the AIP for sponsoring graduate students.

I look forward to seeing you all at SuperDARN 2001 in Itay.

Peter Dyson
Convenor
SuperDARN 2000 Workshop

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