It is sad to record that György Tarcsai, better known to his friends and colleagues in the West as 'George', died on 7 February 1998. He was a member of the Space Research Group of Eötvös University, Budapest, Hungary. Although he began his research career studying the solar limb and corona by means of Doppler shifts in occulted radio sources, he spent most of his scientific life working in the VERSIM field. An important contribution in 1975 was the development of a curve-fitting procedure for whistler spectra, still widely used today. He then applied this technique to large numbers of whistlers recorded in Hungary, to deduce the characteristics of plasmaspheric electron densities and plasmasphere-ionosphere coupling fluxes in the middle magnetosphere. Later, with Dániel Hamar and others, he worked on the digital matched filtering of whistler data, and, in collaboration with the BAS VLF group, applied this to whistlers recorded digitally in Antarctica; this revealed unexpected fine structure in the whistler spectra and propagation characteristics. Most recently he was involved in setting up narrowband receivers to record Trimpi events in Hungary. George published about 30 research papers in the VERSIM and related fields (see http://gis.elte.hu/eng41a.html for a list) but was also active in research on applications of remote sensing (atmospheric correction, crop yield forecasting, etc.). He participated in several URSI meetings, most recently at Lille in 1996. He was an active member of the VERSIM working group for many years, and will be greatly missed by the community, especially those who knew him personally and valued his friendship.
March 1998
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