by Steve Ackerman, Annual Meeting Co-Chair
Raj concluded a posting about communications themes at the Annual Meeting by saying, “Have fun.” That ought to be easy. It is always a joy to meet old friends at these meetings, and make new ones. In addition to the Wednesday banquet, the lunches, the art show, and WeatherFest, there is lots of fun in store at various sessions throughout the meeting. Everyone has their favorite lightning story, and there are a several papers throughout the conference on lightning; including recent modeling advance, future satellite observations, lightning climatologies and communicating safety procedures to the public. I’m looking forward to the session on Eyjafjallajökull Volcanic Eruption of 2010, to hear about what was learned about the eruption and its impact. There are several papers that deal with artificial intelligence – which makes me wonder how listening is incorporated into A.I. There are many interesting papers presented throughout the meeting and the AMS calendar scheduler is a good way to keep track of papers you want to hear. There is a lot of ‘pink’ in my schedule (for those who haven’t used it, a pink cell denotes a conflict between one or more events.) I also enjoy the poster sessions — that is a good time to have some dialogue about research that interests me.
Oh, and once we all learn how to communicate better, take some time to comment on the AMS draft statement on “communicating science.”