I was my first EGU meeting here in Vienna (finally – after 3 years abroad I make it to a conference in my home town 😉 and my impressions were mixed.
Organisation was excellent – no problems with registration. A weekly pass for public transport was part of the registration and the venue at the Austria Centre Vienna was pleasant. No “big†book of abstracts was published this year, so I had to put a programme together in advance (or at one of the many terminals onsite), which was a good thing, because I was very well prepared once the conference started, knowing each and every session I would attend. Browsing through the programme on a computer screen is still a pain, though, if you just want to know, what is going on.Â
I presented a poster and was pleasantly surprised that I had a couple of minutes during the oral session to talk about my work. I had even more time than originally allocated, because most poster presenters did not show up and so I had a little mini-presentation to get people interested. This paid off and I had a very good attendance at the poster right after the oral sessions with good discussions.
Quality of the contributions was so-so, especially at the oral sessions (bad posters are more easily by-passed). I sat through some incredibly bad presentations, not formally, but also content-wise, where speakers presented very unreliable data; discussions that I had afterwards did not elucidate the situation, but rather convince me that the methods used were indeed unreliable. While I acknowledge that the quality of a presentation is difficult to judge from an abstract, I was still surprised at the number of these contributions.
Overall though, I had a very positive impression of the meeting. People attending were mostly Europeans, so after 3 AGU meetings it was good to get an overview of European research in my own field of work. I have met two research groups, who do similar work than I do – VOC determination in snow and it was good to exchange ideas and approaches. VOC speciation in snow is still not pursued by a lot of people – lots of work for me to do. I always find conferences very stimulating, so I also found the time to work a little on my current manuscript and incorporate some of the thoughts that came up during the meeting.
