C.T. Russell Center for Academic Publications, Japan, Tokyo. Divisions II and III are the IAGA divisions concerned with the ionosphere and magnetosphere, respectively. The purpose of the session on the timing of substorm events was to come to grips with one of the key experimental issues of substorm research.
Many techniques are available for studying substorm phenomena.
Substorms may be identified in auroral photographs. They can be recognized by their production of magnetic pulsations. They can be seen in the records of ground based magnetic observatories as ionospheric and magnetospheric currents build up and decay. They can also be identified in spacecraft records obtained deep in space. These multitude of diagnostics lead to problems because they are not intercalibrated.