Minutes of the Business Meeting of IAGA WG V-OBS
Montreal, Canada, July 13, 2019
Agenda
1. Welcome and Agenda Approval
2. Report on the XVIIIth Observatory Workshop and Summer School held at the Conrad
Observatory near Vienna, Austria, on June 21 to 29, 2018
3. Information about the XIXth Observatory Workshop to be held at the Observatory
Kazan, Russia, on July 6 to 12, 2020
4. Report from WG Chair & Co-Chair
5. News from INTERMAGNET
6. Information and Vote about the XXth Observatory Workshop
7. Resolutions
8. Sessions Proposals for IAGA 2021, Hyderabad, India9. Election of WG Chair and Co-Chair
10. AOB
1. Welcome and Agenda Approval
WG Chair Arnaud Chulliat welcomed the participants and presented the agenda. The agenda wasunanimously approved.
2. Report on the XVIIIth Observatory Workshop including summer school held at theConrad Observatory near Vienna, Austria, on June 21 to 29, 2018
Roman Leonhardt reported on the workshop, which was attended by 110 participants from 36
countries. 39 talks and 35 posters were presented. A total of 123 DI-measurements by 32 observers
were made and the observers were informed through individual reports about their results. The
summer school lasted from June 21st to June 24th and Alan Berarducci, Tim White and Chris
Turbitt gave courses on geomagnetic observatory activities for 23 participants. Workshop
proceedings are published partly in the CobsJournal (http://www.conradobservatory.at/zamg/index.php/downloads-en/category/5-cobsjournal) and partly in a special issueof the peer-reviewed journal Studia Geophysica et Geodetica. A more detailed report is available at
http://www.iaga-aiga.org/data/uploads/pdf/newsletter/iaganews_55.pdf. More information on theworkshop can also be found at https://cobs.zamg.ac.at/iaga2018/. A MagNetE meeting and an
INTERMAGNET were co-hosted.
3. Information about the XIXth Observatory Workshop to be held at the Observatory Kazan,Russia, on July 6 to 12, 2020
Anatoly Soloviev provided the following information about the upcoming workshop:• The workshop is planned for July 6 to 12, 2020, and will be hosted by Kazan FederalUniversity• Additional pillars were constructed and meeting rooms were booked.
• The INTERMAGNET meeting will be co-hosted.
• A Summer School is planned.

4. Report from WG Chair and Co-Chair
Main activities since the 2017 Business Meeting (BM) in Cape Town:1•••••The XVIIIth IAGA Workshop on Geomagnetic Observatory Instruments, Data Acquisition
and Processing was successfully held at Conrad Observatory close to Vienna, Austria, onJune 21 to 29, 2018. It was hosted by ZAMG; see this report and IAGA News No. 55(December 2018, page 12).
Preparations for the XIXth IAGA Workshop on Geomagnetic Observatory Instruments, DataAcquisition and Processing hosted by Kazan Federal University are on the way, see thisreport.
A call for proposals to host the XXth workshop was issued in November 2018 and re-issued
in April 2019, with the intention that the winning bid be selected by the participants of thisBM. A proposal by Katia Pinheiro from Observatório Nacional, Brazil, was received (seebelow).
The list of observatories and IAGA codes is available as a Google Fusion Table on the WG
website, https://www.bgs.ac.uk/iaga/vobs/. We thank the British Geological Survey for theircontinuous support of the WG website, and Susan Macmillan for updating the Fusion Table.
The list might be migrated to another technology in the future. Emails will be sent out
regularly (e.g. annually) in the future to ask the community about the status of theirobservatories.
o 87 observatories have “Uncertain” status; please let us know if you have informationon them.
o WG V-DAT and ISGI requested to add a new field to the list that shall contain theK=9 lower limit. WG V-OBS, in cooperation with WG V-DAT and ISGI, will
enable such a possibility in the future.
Status of observatories - new IAGA codes:
o Santa Elena, SEL (status preliminary, code obtained February 2018)o Odessa 2, ODE (status preliminary, code obtained 2018)o White Sea, WSE (status preliminary, code obtained January 2019)o Edea, EDA (status preliminary, code obtained April 2019)o Gyulagarak, GLK (status preliminary, code obtained June 2019)o Observatories that have “Preliminary” status, please consider submitting your data toa WDC and/or applying for INTERMAGNET membership, so that the observatory
status can be changed to “Open”.

5. News from INTERMAGNET
Simon Flower, Chairman of the INTERMAGNET operations committee, gave a report onINTERMAGNET activities:• Aims of INTERMAGNET• New metadata system will provide better integration of geomagnetic observatory data sets
into broader data systems, will need support by users to keep information up-to-date• 1-second data requirements• Successful introduction of quasi-definitive (QD) data
• New default license of INTERMAGNET data is CC-BY-NC 4.0, some institutes might haveless restrictive licenses.
• DOI introduced for 2013 definitive data DVD. For 2014 definitive data the last DVD waspublished and for 2015 a USB is published with all definitive data from 1991 to 2015 (25years).
• From 2016 onwards, definitive data will only be published online in the form of aINTERMAGNET Reference Data Set (IRDS).
6. Information and Vote about the XXth Observatory Workshop
A proposal to host the workshop by Observatório Nacional was presented by Gabriel B. Soares onbehalf of Katia Pinheiro (Observatório Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). The following information
was provided:2

The workshop will be hosted at Vassouras magnetic observatory (tentative date: September
12 to 16, 2020), while an additional summer school, with a focus on equatorial geomagnetic
observatory work, will be hosted at Tatuoca magnetic observatory (tentative date:September 9 to 11, 2020).
• Vassouras is close to Rio de Janiro. Tatuoca is close to Belem in the state of Para.
• Registration fee (except accommodation) approx. 500 EUR
The Vassouras/Tatuoca proposal was selected by unanimous vote.
•7. Resolution Proposals
No resolution proposal was brought forward to the WG
8. Sessions Proposals for IAGA 2021, Hyderabad, India• Geomagnetic observatories: Current developments and integration of ground and space
based data (A. Morschhauser, K. Arora)• Planetary magnetic fields and secular variation (with V-MOD, Div. I) (Ch. Finlay, I.
Wardinski, NN)• Geomagnetic observations for space science, space weather and space climate applications(with V-DAT and/or Div. IV) (Pierdavide Coisson, Miquel Torta)(The proposed titles and conveners were later modified during the Division V business meeting.)
9. Election of WG Chair and Co-Chair
Jürgen Matzka was elected Chair of the working group for the next four years (until the end of thenext General Assembly of IUGG in 2023). Katia Pinheiro (Observatório Nacional, Brazil) andAnatoly Soloviev (Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences) kindly agreed to be
candidate for the working group Co-Chair and Katia Pinheiro was elected as working group CoChair.
10. AOB
The delegates thanked Arnaud Chulliat for his service as Chair of the working group. Arnaud
Chulliat thanked the participants for attending.

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