During the AGU Fall Meeting, the poster hall is buzzing with discussion. Credit: Gary Wagner

This is part 2 of recommendations from AGU editors and staff of particularly interesting and accessible sessions and presentations at the 2016 AGU Fall Meeting.  This collection covers sessions and events on Wednesday thru Friday. For Monday and Tuesday see here.

Have your own suggestion of an interdisciplinary session?  Please provide your recommendation in the comments section below and help attendees navigate the meeting (signed suggestions only).

In addition to general tips and highlights, other suggestions and recommendations are grouped as follows:
Energy and Other Policy, General issues in Science, and Professional Development
Space and Planets
Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate
Hydrology and Earth’s Surface
Solid Earth Geophysics and Tectonics

Energy and Other Policy, General issues in Science, and Professional Development

A variety of sessions throughout the week cover broad aspects of ethics and open data including:

Others related broadly to policy and practice include:

Wednesday

  • PA31A Climate Change Impacts on the Transportation Sector Posters Wednesday, 14 December 2016 08:00 – 12:20 Moscone South- Poster Hall. The public debate about climate change has finally moved on from ‘Is it happening?’ and ‘Is it caused by humans?’ to ‘What are the surprising and unexpected impacts going to be?’ Paul Williams (Geophysical Research Letters).These two sessions (PA31A, ED41B) are excellent examples of surprising new climate research.  The first session focuses on the impacts of climate change on aviation and ground transport.  The second session explores how the arts can help in communicating climate impacts. Paul Williams (Geophysical Research Letters)
  • PA44B GeoHealth-Innovative Research at the Intersection of Geoscience and Health Science II.  Thursday, 15 December 2016 16:00 – 18:00 Moscone South – 104. This session provides an overview of many of the topics covered under the interdisciplinary topic of geohealth and highlights a growing diverse group of talks at the meeting and emerging research discipline.

Thursday

Friday

  • PA51C Earth Science in Service to the Sustainable Development Goals I Friday, 16 December 2016 08:00 – 10:00 Moscone South- 304 Daniela Ceccarelli (Geohealth). Satellite remote sensing datasets and earth observation techniques are now being applied to environmental surveillance in a comprehensive new approach in support of sustainable development. Daniela Ceccarelli (Geohealth)
  • H51M Hydrology, Society, and Environmental Change: Coupled Human-Water Dynamics across Scales I Friday, 16 December 2016 08:00 – 10:00 Moscone West- 3016. This session defines interaction of human population with water resources taking into consideration large scale geophysical processes, water-ecological ecological processes (including pathogen cycles) and societal determinants, such as access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities. Daniela Ceccarelli (Geohealth). In fact, sustainable water management in the era of the Anthropocene demands an understanding of the inter-relationship between humans and water resources. The new field of socio-hydrology was introduced to deal explicitly with the long-term emergent dynamics arising from the bi-directional feedbacks between coupled human-water systems, and has seen tremendous growth in the last 5 years. Increasingly socio-hydrology needs to account for feedbacks between hydrological and social processes across different spatial and temporal scales in order to explore tradeoffs and synergies in the system, and to provide scientific support for solving pressing water resources problems. The session collects several interesting papers that will shed new light on the field of socio-hydrology. Alberto Montanari (Water Resources Research)

Space and Planets

Wednesday

Thursday

Also:

Friday

Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate

Wednesday

  • C33D Assessing the Stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheets and Their Contribution toward Global Sea Level I Wednesday, 14 December 2016 13:40 – 15:40 Moscone West- 3007 and C34B Assessing the Stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheets and Their Contribution toward Global Sea Level II Wednesday, 14 December 2016 16:00 – 18:00 Moscone West- 3007. These two session include several presentations of the very latest evaluations of Antarctic mass balance and response to climate change, collated from a variety of data sets and perspectives. As well as addressing temporal trends, the session includes presentations evaluating regional change across the continent and from different physical environments – together combining to influence the planet’s future sea-level change. Bryn Hubbard (JGR: Earth Surface)
  • A31M Processes of Sub-Cloud Scales: Modeling, Observation, and Parameterization for Larger-Scale Models I Wednesday, 14 December 2016 08:00 – 10:00 Moscone West- 3006. Clouds continue to defy our understanding and are major sources of uncertainty in weather forecasting and climate projection. Key to addressing such outstanding cloud challenges are the processes that occur on space-time scales at individual clouds or smaller, including entrainment/detrainment, turbulent mixing, turbulence, cloud microphysics, boundary layer processes, radiation; and process interactions. These sub-cloud processes, whose parameterizations will likely become more important as weather and climate models increase their resolutions, pose particular challenges to modeling studies, observations, as well as parameterization development. This session focuses on modeling (e.g., CRM, LES and DNS), observation, and parameterization of such sub-cloud processes. Also invited are studies on unified treatment of different processes, and integration from observations to theories to models. Yangang Liu (JGR: Atmospheres)

Thursday

Friday

  • OS52B Ocean Salinity, Water Cycle Variability, and Science Results from Satellite Measurements I Friday, 16 December 2016 10:20 – 12:20 Moscone West- 3011 Meghan Cronin (Geophysical Research Letters)
  • B51L The Fate of Carbon in Plants and Terrestrial Ecosystems: From Respiration to Allocation I Friday, 16 December 2016 08:00 – 10:00 Moscone West- 2008 Susan Trumbore (Global Biogeochemical Cycles)
  • A51N Multisensor, Model, and Measurement Synergy: Global Aerosol Characterization I  Friday, 16 December 2016 08:00 – 10:00 Moscone West- 3004; A52B Multisensor, Model, and Measurement Synergy: Global Aerosol Characterization II  Friday, 16 December 2016  10:20 – 12:20 Moscone West- 3004; A53C Multisensor, Model, and Measurement Synergy: Global Aerosol Characterization III Posters Friday, 16 December 2016 13:40 – 18:00 Moscone South- Poster Hall. Aerosols perturb Earth’s radiation budget, its hydrological and chemical cycles, strongly impacting climate, and possibly having some influence on weather.  Airborne particles also influence air quality, impairing visibility and affecting human health. Characterizing aerosol properties globally with sufficient fine-scale physical and chemical detail to address these issues requires a diversity of remote sensing, modeling, and in situ measurement techniques, plus effective techniques for integrating these elements. Reducing uncertainties in aerosol effects requires not only improving the measurements, but also continued model development and creation of new integration methods.  This AGU session, now in its 12th year and comprising two oral and one poster session, has tracked the advancement of these efforts.  It focuses on sharing all relevant aspects of our collective aerosol measurement, modeling, and synergistic experiences. This year submissions discuss: aerosol-data synergies; innovative products & retrieval approaches; model-data comparisons & integration; application of multi-sensor, model and/or measurement-data to a range of interdisciplinary studies.  Invited speakers include Norman O’Neill (University of Sherbrooke) with a review of aerosol remote sensing in the Arctic and Paul A. Newman (NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center) developing a NASA response strategy for the next “big” volcano eruption.  Rob Levy (JGR: Atmospheres)

Hydrology and Earth’s Surface

Wednesday

Thursday

Solid Earth Geophysics, Geochemistry, and Tectonics

Wednesday

Thursday

Again, some general tips and highlights.  Look at the Fall Meeting schedule for:

  • Named lectures—these are longer presentations, up to an hour, by a selected speaker or award winner.
  • Union Sessions—these includes sessions of broad interest.
  • A series of events and town halls continues on using data, best practices in reproducibility and creating data management plans, and more.
  • AGU On-Demand—these sessions will be live-streamed and available on-demand.  These sessions and talks were selected as being of general or broad interest and are organized by topic.
  • AGU Press Conferences:  A number of talks and sessions will be selected for press conferences at the meeting.  These will be posted about 1 week before the meeting.  Look for information here and find the related sessions.
  • Swirls provide paths connecting several topics (similar to the AGU on-demand topics) across sections and feature talks and sessions of broader interest and are listed here.

—Brooks Hanson, Director of Publications, AGU; email: [email protected]

Citation:

Hanson, B. (2016), Navigating the 2016 Fall Meeting: Part 2, Eos, 97, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018EO063309. Published on 22 November 2016.

Text © 2016. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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