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Holly Gilbert awarded the 2025 Irene González Hernández Prize
HAO is proud to announce that our director, Holly Gilbert, is the recipient of the 2025 Irene González Hernández Prize. As quoted from the SPD website announcement..."The Irene González Hernández Prize, established in 2024, celebrates mid-career scientists for transformative contributions to solar research, leadership, and community service." Congratulations Holly!

Cutting-edge SPIn4D project combines AI and Astronomy
Matthias Rempel, et al. combine cutting-edge solar astronomy with advanced computer science to analyze data from the world’s largest ground-based solar telescope located atop Haleakalā, Maui. See featured story from the University of Hawaiʻi News. The team’s research recently published in Astrophysical Journal focuses on their development of deep learning models that rapidly analyze vast amounts of data from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope.

A Magnetohydrodynamic Mechanism for the Formation of Solar Polar Vortices
HAO scientist Mausumi Dikpati's recent significant publication entitled "A Magnetohydrodynamic Mechanism for the Formation of Solar Polar Vortices" is highlighted by NSF-NCAR news website. Dikpati and her co-authors report the first magnetohydrodynamic nonlinear simulations for the formation and evolution of solar polar vortices using a near-surface magnetohydrodynamic shallow-water model.
Latest Research Highlights

Effects of High-Latitude Input on Neutral Wind Structure and Forcing During the 17 March 2013 Storm
Katherine Davidson, Gang Lu, Mark Conde present a quantitative assessment of the thermospheric forcing and its dependence on high-latitude driving. Due to its coupling with the ionosphere via ion-neutral collisions, the simulated neutral wind and the corresponding thermospheric forcing from Global Circulation Models (GCMs) are highly dependent on the model's high-latitude ionospheric input.

Evaluating F10.7 and F30 radio fluxes as long-term solar proxies of energy deposition in the thermosphere
Liying Qian, and Kalevi Mursula use model simulations and observations to examine how well the F10.7 and F30 solar radio fluxes have represented solar forcing in the thermosphere during the last 60 years of weakening solar activity.

SynCOM: An Empirical Model for High-Resolution Simulations of Transient Solar Wind Flows
Published: November 2024. Sarah Gibson, V. P. Moraes Filho, V. Uritsky, B. J. Thompson, and C. E. DeForest demonstrate how SynCOM can be employed to assess the precision and performance of two different flow tracking methods. By providing a ground-truth based on observational data, we highlight the importance of SynCOM in confirming observational standards for detecting coronal flows.