The 2011 ILWS Workshop "Towards the Next Solar Maximum" will be held on 28 August - 2 September 2011 at the Friendship Palace in Beijing, China.

This will be the fourth in a series of very successful and well-attended meetings sponsored by the International Living With a Star (ILWS) program, under the overall auspices of the ILWS Steering Committee: Wu Ji (China - Chair) Lika Guhathakurta (NASA - Vice Chair), Philippe Escoubet (ESA), Masaki Fujimoto (JAXA), Lev Zelenyi (Russia) and William Liu (CSA). Previous meetings have been held in Goa, India in 2006, Varna, Bulgaria in 2007 and Ubatuba, Brasil in 2009.

The recent somewhat unexpectedly deep and prolonged solar minimum and the present rise to the next solar maximum set the stage for the upcoming workshop. As in the previous ILWS workshops, the purpose is to promote the science of the connected Sun-Earth system by bringing together members of the international scientific community, in particular scientific observers, instrumentalists, and modelers. The workshop will provide an excellent opportunity to showcase the science of the hosting nation (China), and will serve as a forum to discuss the wider context of ILWS missions. It will also deal with the facilitation, optimization and scientific exploitation of such missions and other related activities for the upcoming decade.

Scientific sessions will feature solar, heliospheric and geospace processes, encompassing all areas of ILWS Sun-Earth system science.

The workshop is open to the international space weather research community, and attendees do not need to have participated in an ILWS program or activity in the past.

A draft session programme and more information about abstract submission details and the venue will be circulated as soon as the Scientific Organising Committee (SOC) has finalized its initial tasks.

We look forward to seeing you in Beijing,

Prof. Hermann Opgenoorth (Swed. Inst. of Space Physics, Uppsala, Sweden)

Prof. Chi Wang (Center for Space Science and Applied Res., Beijing, China)

ILWS 2011 Meeting Conveners and Co-Chairs of the 2011 ILWS SOC

The 2011 ILWS Science Organizing Committee (SOC)

Hermann Opgenoorth (Sweden - Chair)

Chi Wang (China - Co-Chair)

Stuart Bale (USA)

Dipankar Banerjee (India)

Archana Bhattacharya (India)

KyungSuk Cho (Korea)

Iannis Dandouras (France)

Malcolm Dunlop (UK)

Walter Gonzalez (Brasil)

Keith Groves (USA)

Vladimir Kuznetsov (Russia)

William Liu (Canada)

Steve Milan (UK)

Takahiro Obara (Japan)

Nikolai Oestgaard (Norway)

ZuYin Pu (China)

David G. Sibeck (USA)

Barbara J. Thompson (USA)

Bruce Tsurutani (USA)

Chuan-Yi Tu (China)

JingXiu Wang (China)

Kiyohumi Yumoto (Japan)

Mei Zhang (China/USA)

For more information on the ILWS program

please see: http://ilwsonline.org