The three-day meeting was concerned with two topics: the role of atmospheric aerosol and coupling with the electrical circuit of the magnetosphere and the ionosphere. Lectures and talks were presented by scientists specialising in the above topics as well as by leading GEC researchers. The workshop participants were welcomed by the director of the Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IGF PAS), prof. Paweł Rowiński. 

In the first session, the participants listened to, among others, the comprehensive talk by prof. Brian Tinsley (University of Texas at Dallas, USA) on the influence of the electric and magnetic fields of the solar wind on the temporal changes of the vertical component of the atmospheric electric current density in the global circuit at different latitudes and in relation to weather and climate.

In the afternoon session, Dr. Artur Szkop (IGF PAS) gave a lecture on atmospheric aerosols, including their impact on atmospheric electricity, and prof. Aleksander Pietruczuk presented methods for measuring various properties of atmospheric aerosols and various instruments used in observations, including at IGF PAS. The day ended with a guided tour of places associated with Maria Skłodowska-Curie, starting in front of the Staszic Palace, the venue of the conference.

On the second day of the workshop, Prof. Steve Milan (University of Leicester, UK) gave a lecture on the electrodynamics of the coupled solar wind - magnetosphere - Earth's ionosphere system, and Dr. Maria Walach (University of Lancaster, UK) on the time variability of the ionosphere electric fields and their modelling. Both first day and second day specialised talks raised a lot of interest from the participants, especially from the atmospheric electric community. 

The afternoon was devoted to a poster session, in which many workshop participants took an active part (with several short presentations before the discussion at the posters) and a trip to the IGF PAN Stanisław Kalinowski Geophysical Observatory in Świder. The history and current activities of the observatory were presented by Dr. Marek Kubicki and Dr. Daniel Kępski.

The last day of the workshop was no less intense. The morning session was filled with talks on the global circuit and important, unsolved problems concerning the circuit and the modelling of various effects and couplings occurring in the GEC. The speakers included professors Michael Rycroft (CAESAR Consultancy, UK), Earle Williams (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) and Masashi Kamogawa (University of Shizuoka, Japan). The results of his work were also presented by Dr. José Tacza (IGF PAS). 

In the last session of the workshop, which had the nature of a tutorial, Dr. hab. Anna Odzimek (IGF PAS) presented the engineering method of global circuit modelling on the example of the EGATEC model, and Dr. Daniel Kępski (IGF PAN) showed the visualization of digitised data from the yearbooks of the Geophysicsal Observatory in Świder 1965-2005. 

Both the digitisation of the yearbooks and the development of the EGATEC model are the main tasks of the NCN 2021/41/B/ST10/04448 project, which ends in early 2025, and the organisation of the workshops was an important goal and moment of the project.

The workshop sessions were led by Dr. Anna Odzimek, Dr. Izabela Pawlak, Dr. José Tacza and Dr. Daniel Kępski, and Dr. Alnilam Fernandes supervised the smooth operation of the registration desk. We would like to thank all participants for taking part in the PolGEC 2024 workshop.

More details at: https://polgec.igf.edu.pl/