I am currently in San Francisco attending the AGU Fall meeting. And it is pretty amazing. 11,500 Earth Scientists coming together for a meeting. This is not only utterly overwhelming, but also a good opportunity for me to have a look outside my field and engage in discussions with other scientists. All provided that you are well prepared or you will find yourself staring helplessly into the 540 page program.
And I was quite well prepared – time on the plane helps 😉 I have already presented my poster and I am very satisfied with the discussions. I have received some good feedback and was encouraged by several people to make measurements that are part of a larger campaign in order to put my data into perspective (… and I am working on that …). I have also participated in an OASIS meeting – a project that would like to be part of, one way or the other (http://www.oasishome.net/). There were quite a few sessions on atmosphere-snow interactions and I think that my research fits in well here.
Apart from research related sessions (I have mostly attended atmospheric, aerosol and cryosphere sessions) I have also attended sessions that deal with communication of scientists with the media and the general public, which I found quite interesting and partly somewhat controversial. Objectivity, translation of scientific results and communicating uncertainties (e.g. in models or measurements) – who should do the translating – scientists or policy advisors, were the core of this discussion. Furthermore, I am pretty busy writing up some stuff, which I didn’t have time for in the past weeks. Lot’s of work, but interesting and fun.
