Professor Richard A. Goldberg

Vitae

Dr. Goldberg has been actively engaged in problems dealing with Solar-Terrestrial Relationships and with the physics and chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere for over 30 years. Since 1964, he has been a research scientist with the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. In this capacity, he has dealt with studies concerning the ionized and neutral regions of the atmosphere, including meteorology and climate, from both a theoretical and experimental approach. His early contributions to this area of research predicted distributional shapes for the ionospheric topside electron density concentrations near the magnetic equator and under the influence of the Earth's magnetic field. Later, he turned his attention to mesospheric problems and was responsible for the development of a rocket payload including a pumped quadrupole ion mass spectrometer along with additional complementary instruments to measure electron density, total ion density, and various ionizing radiations. This unique payload was flown successfully on numerous rocket flights after its development, thereby permitting major advances in evaluation of problems dealing with the mesosphere and thermosphere. He is has recently studied problems relating to the polar summer mesosphere, problems to analyze high latitude energy inputs into the middle atmosphere to study middle atmospheric electrodynamics and dynamics, and problems to probe the physics of relativistic electron precipitation in the magnetosphere induced by tropospheric lightning, all making use of rocketborne techniques. Several of his recent rocket programs have included Aurorozone I and II and HIREP from Alaska; MAE I, II and III from Norway and Alaska; MAED and NLC-91 from Sweden, Condor from Peru, and MAC-Epsilon from Norway, and most recently, MALTED-Guarafrom Brazil.

Dr. Goldberg has chaired or served on the panels of several working groups concerned with solar-terrestrial relationships. He is currently chairman of the International Working Group on Electrodynamics of the Middle Atmosphere under the auspices of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA) and is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Committee on Atmospheric and Space Electricity (CASE). He also serves on two of the STEP Working Groups and is the project leader for the international STEP project entitled "Electrodynamic Studies of Polar Mesospheric Clouds". He has convened numerous symposia for IAGA, IAMAP, and COSPAR, and cosponsored a workshop in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, entitled Electrodynamics and Chemistry of the Middle Atmosphere in March, 1992. From 1989-91, he also served a two year visiting scientist appointment as Program Director for the Solar Terrestrial Research Program at the National Science Foundation. In this capacity, he was responsible for management of funding to most of the national scientific communities engaged in solar physics, solar wind interactions, cosmic rays, and solar terrestrial relations. Finally, he is now serving in a recently appointed position as adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. From 1984-94, he also served on the Eberly College of Science Alumni Board of Directors.

Dr. Goldberg has published about 80 papers and delivered many invited reviews at scientific meetings and workshops around the world. He is co-author of a book entitled "Sun, Weather, and Climate" which has already been translated into Russian and Chinese editions. He was editor of a second book entitled "Rocket Techniques in the Middle Atmosphere" as part of the MAP Handbook Monograph series, and is now a regional editor of the Journal for Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics. He also has made numerous contributions to more popular references including articiles on "The Sun" and The Upper Atmosphere" in the newly published Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate (Oxford University Press, 1996).