Lauri Holappa

ST Solar-Terrestrial Sciences

The 2020 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Lauri Holappa for outstanding research in the field of space climate and space weather.

Lauri Holappa has developed innovative ways for exploiting ground-based magnetometer data for space climate and space weather studies. During his PhD studies, Holappa developed novel methods for extracting information about the centennial evolution of solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic field.

After obtaining his PhD, Holappa worked as a postdoctoral researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. During this visit he showed that the east-west (By) component of the interplanetary magnetic field has a strong effect on geomagnetic activity that was previously largely unnoticed. This “By-effect” has tangible relevance, e.g., in space weather predictions. Currently, the physical cause of the By-effect is not well understood. To pursue this discovery and its implications further, Holappa recently received a highly competitive Postdoctoral Researcher grant from the Academy of Finland.

Despite his early career stage, Holappa has contributed to a wide range of international collaborative work, e.g., by developing new and more robust measures of geomagnetic activity and their use in monitoring magnetic storms. These new magnetic indices are now offered routinely online. Because of his significant contributions to the field of space climate and space weather, Lauri Holappa is a worthy recipient of the EGU Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award.