Citation | Mike Lockwood is distinguished for major advances in understanding the connections between Earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere and the interplanetary magnetic field. He pioneered studies from spacecraft of ionospheric plasma flows into the magnetosphere. Together with Stan Cowley, he established how ionospheric flow is excited by magnetic reconnection with the interplanetary field. His continuing work on pulsed magnetic reconnection has led to key predictions of magnetospheric behaviour which he is now testing with Cluster observations. He has discovered that open magnetic flux from the Sun is highly correlated with total irradiance and has increased by a factor 2.4 in the twentieth century - a crucial result for climate change studies. |