During December every year, over 20,000 people convene both in-person and online at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Annual Fall Meeting. In 2023, San Francisco hosted the meeting at the Moscone Centre between 11-15th December, covering themes from across the geosciences domain. The tagline for this year’s meeting was ‘Wide. Open. Science.’, with a number of sessions focussing on open data and diversity and inclusion initiatives throughout the geosciences.
Many members of the CMIP Panel attended the conference, including CMIP Panel co-chair John Dunne (NOAA GFDL) and WIP co-chair and Forcings Task Team (TT) co-lead Paul Durack (PCMDI/LLNL). Other wider panel members in attendance include emeritus member of the CMIP Panel Karl Taylor (PCMDI/LLNL), Data Citation TT co-leads Martina Stockhause (DKRZ) and Sasha Ames (LLNL), Strategic Ensemble Design TT co-lead Isla Simpson (NCAR), Model Documentation TT co-lead David Hassel (NCAS), Model Benchmarking TT co-lead Forrest Hoffman (ORNL), and Fresh Eyes on CMIP co-lead Douglas Rao (NC State).
Having such a variety of CMIP experts at AGU allowed for our Townhall event ‘Co-creating the future of CMIP’ to cover a wide range of the latest CMIP updates. The Townhall was chaired by John Dunne, with additional presentations from the Forcings TT, Model Benchmarking TT, Fresh Eyes on CMIP, as well as invited presentations from ScenarioMIP by co-chair Brian O’Neill (JGCRI/PNNL) and HighresMIP2 by Paul Ullrich (UC Davis). Isla Simpson presented the proposed CMIP AR7 Fast Track experimental design. This proposal represents a shift away from the burdensome design of CMIP6, with all experiments needing to be delivered on the same timeline, and instead moves towards fast tracking a specified set of experiments from Community MIPs to be ready for the next IPCC Assessment Report. Other experiments from MIPs can be requested on their own timeline, based on scientific need. After the Townhall, John Dunne commented,
“I was proud that the CMIP Town Hall had broad participation with a great introduction of new faces and energy stimulating ongoing community discussions on how to most effectively move forward in this new phase.”
John Dunne, CMIP Panel co-chair
Paul Durack added,
“The town hall attracted a diverse array of contributors and stakeholders. We received targeted feedback for the ongoing CMIP7 planning, with many following up with panel and task team members during ongoing discussions after the session.”
Paul Durack, WIP co-chair
Questions with their given answers from the Townhall can be found on our Q&A Forum and slides from the event can be viewed on the CMIP Community Zenodo.
During the Townhall, we launched two new opportunities within the Fresh Eyes community. There are two positions available to co-lead the Data Preparation subgroup, for which applications will remain open until the end of January. We also launched the Fresh Eyes Directory. This a new initiative to ensure that opportunities and collaboration within the CMIP Early Career Researcher (ECR) community is as open as possible. Joining the directory allows for members details to be published in a members-only space, allowing for collaboration and communication across the community.
In addition to the Townhall, CMIP Community members were involved in the organisation of many other sessions across the conference:
- Paul Durack and Vaishali Naik were on the convening team for the ‘Climate forcing: quantifying the roles and responses of anthropogenic and natural climate drivers’ session alongside Geeta Persad (UT Austin) and Duncan Watson-Parris (UC San Diego). This session featured talks and posters on quantifying and assessing natural or anthropogenic climate drivers, otherwise known as forcing agents.
- Paul Durack was also involved in convening an eLightening session with Forrest Hoffman, Sheryas Cholia (LBNL), and Jusin Hnilo (US DoE) titled ‘Open earth and environmental data advance scientific discovery’. This session saw interactive poster presentations on new analysis paradigms, novel hardware and software infrastructure and data access and management tools.
- Model Benchmarking Task Team members Jiwoo Lee and Forrest Hoffman co-convened the ‘Systematic Benchmarking of Earth System Models’ session alongside Paul Ullrich and Peter Gleckler. During this session, we saw posters on tools and methods used to evaluate and benchmarking ESMs as well as presentations of new metrics and diagnostics.
- Monday evening also saw a hybrid ESGF2-US meeting held alongside a tutorial for the ESGF service.
