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BAMOS March 2017
Conference Report: AGU Fall Meeting 2016
Damien Irving, Postdoctoral Fellow, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere
The American Geophysical Union( AGU) Fall Meeting has come and gone for another year, and this time I was lucky enough to be in San Francisco during December for all the action. With over 20,000 participants spanning the full range of Earth and space sciences, the conference was like nothing I’ ve ever experienced. To give you an idea of the sheer scale of the event, the daily classifieds listing of presentation and poster titles was 64 pages long, and the twice-daily poster sessions featured more than 2000 posters. Since it’ s impossible to have a common plenary and / or opening address for so many people, the many and varied parallel sessions simply commenced at 8am on Monday and ran relentlessly through until 6pm on Friday.
While new science was obviously the focus of the week, concerns regarding the upcoming inauguration of Donald Trump loomed large. A“ Stand Up for Science” rally was held during the Tuesday lunch break, and in a fiery plenary address California Governor Jerry Brown vowed to challenge any attempt by Trump to interfere with climate science.“ If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite”, Brown said to loud applause.“ We’ re going to collect that data.”
The Meeting was particularly noteworthy for AMOS, with a number of Australians featuring during the annual Honours Ceremony. Matthew England and Harry Hendon were elected as Fellows of AGU, while Tom Beer received the 2016 International Award for his outstanding contribution to furthering the Earth and space sciences and using science for the benefit of society in developing nations. I was particularly grateful to Matthew and Susan Wijffels( who delivered the annual Sverdrup Lecture), who invited myself and a number of other( less accomplished) AMOS scientists to join their table at the Honours Banquet.
My primary concern heading into the conference was that with such a broad focus, there would be little science that was highly relevant to my work. That concern ended up being completely unfounded, as I spent the week dashing between sessions wishing I had more time to fit in some nonclimate related talks. Away from the comfortable familiarity of an AMOS conference or discipline-specific workshop, I also found myself networking more effectively and with a much more diverse group of scientists than I normally would. One such interaction resulted in me visiting Dartmouth in the weeks after the conference to see an atmospheric scientist working with water vapour isotopes, which is definitely not a connection I would have made in my Australian oceanclimate sphere.
While I don’ t think the AGU Fall Meeting is an event I’ d attend every year, it would be well worth it every few years and is certainly an experience I think every AMOS scientist should have at least once.
Now THAT is a poster session. Image: Damien Irving.