Dr Jurgen Watermann

Dr Jurgen Watermann graduated from the University of Goettingen (Germany) with a diploma (MSc equivalent) in physics and mathematics followed by a PhD in physics with specialisation in geophysics. His PhD thesis dealt with the observation, analysis and interpretation of temporally and spatially coincident geomagnetic ULF variations and height modifications of the ionospheric F layer, observed with a ground-based magnetometer and a tristatic HF-CW Doppler radar. 

He assumed various research and teaching positions at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Goettingen where he participated in research projects in solid Earth geophysics, geomagnetism, aeronomy and space physics. He went on to do experimental ionospheric plasma research, first at the Max-Planck-Institute for Aeronomy, Katlenburg-Lindau (Germany), and then at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, National Research Council Canada, Ottawa. Thereafter he transferred to SRI International, Menlo Park, California, where he continued his research analysing data from various ground-based and space borne platforms, foremost the Sondrestrom incoherent scatter radar. Back in Europe, at the NATO SACLANT Undersea Research Center in La Spezia, Italy, he investigated natural and anthropogenic electromagnetic fields in a marine environment using data from instruments deployed on land along the coast and at sea. He then transferred to the Geomagnetism and Space Physics Section of the Danish Meteorological Institute where he became Project Scientist for the Greenland magnetometer array and participated in various international space research teams to work on projects dealing with a large number of coincident multi-sensor multi-point space data sets. During that time he also led a project on the exploitation of data from three US digisondes in operation in Greenland, funded by the European Office of Aerospace Research & Development (EOARD). He then moved to France, and after two years doing ionospheric research at the CNRS Laboratory for Physics and Chemistry of the Environment and Space (LPC2E) in Orleans he founded jfwConsult. 

He started his active participation in space weather research as PI of the ESA funded GAFS (Geomagnetic Activity Forecast Service) project. Subsequently he became Working Group leader and member of the Steering Committee of the COST Actions 724 and ES0803 on space weather, was an initial participant of the EU-FP7 space weather project ATMOP (from which he resigned after six months for family reasons), a participant of the EU-FP7 Infrastructure project ESPAS, and is currently a participant of the EUH2020 Research and Innovation Action TechTIDE. As consultant to RHEA Systems SA (Belgium) he was involved in the ESA-SSA-SWE projects SNI, SN-VI, and CO-II. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate, an international peer reviewed open access science journal. 

The majority of his research work involved multi-instrument multi-point observations taken on ground and in space. It required becoming familiar with various data formats and processing methods, with data quality assessment, and not least with data mining in order to collect data sets as complete as possible.