This week, the 28th Annual Conference of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS) is happening, for the first time in the virtual world. Hundreds of attendees are spending the week talking weather, climate, oceans, and much more, and most of it with a heavy focus on Australasia and the Southern Hemisphere in general.
It’s worth noting the importance and size of this effort. For those who unfamiliar with scientific conferences – they are not just thrown together. Volunteer scientists squeeze months of preparation, proposing sessions, organising into teams to run the sessions, requesting abstracts and making the tough decisions about who gets speak. Those who want to present their work sweat over their abstracts and their talks or posters. Speakers usually get around 12 minutes in total, including questions, and heaven help those who speak overtime or have technical issues. The terror and humiliation of mucking up a talk in front of all the experts in your field, some of whom you might be depending upon for the chance of future employment, is not to be underestimated.
AMOS itself should be celebrated. This will be stating the obvious to anybody in the field, but the Southern Hemisphere is numerically a minnow in meteorological sciences, just as in so much else. The major conferences in the north, such as AGU and AMS in the US, attract thousands of delegates from over the world (the American Meteorological Society alone has around 12000 members, as compared to 500 in AMOS). Southern Hemisphere attendees at those conferences have to suffer through endless northern-hemisphere centric science whilst occasionally needing to remind others that half the world is south of the equator and things can spin differently there. AMOS is one of very few organisations to be focused on what goes on down under, and that is critically important for advancing weather, climate, and ocean understanding in Australia, and improving our ability to help weather-affected activities in Australia (ie, everything).
What have we learned so far? Individual highlights will be different for everybody, and as for every major conference these days, the Twittersphere is filling with fascinating snippets. Some of the big themes have been:
- As you would expect, lots of hard work on climate and climate projections for Australia. Our wealth and depth of understanding of current, past, and future climates is built piece by piece, study by study, late night by late night. Climate sceptics little understand the insult that they are dealing to scientists when they dismiss climate science; behind the thousands of studies on climate issues are dedicated researchers who are not recompensed fairly for their intelligence and commitment.
- Many studies on future extreme events, across heat, flood, rainfall, bushfire weather, drought, thunderstorms, tropical cyclones, waves, and more. Planning for future Australian extremes is an essential part of our climate response.
- Compound events – events that happen together in some way, such as heatwaves and bushfires.
- Antarctica and the Southern Ocean – critical for our understanding of our patch of the world
- Improving services for the renewable energy sector, which depends heavily on knowing the sun, wind, and rain across the country.
- Weather and climate impacts on human health
- Better severe weather forecasting
- Communication to the public and to colleagues, a critical part of every scientist’s job.
What shines through conferences such as this is that science is not a job – it’s a vocation. Some of those running or participating in the sessions have been retired for many years (if not decades) from their paying jobs. They’re not just there for the class reunions – they’re there because they have made lifelong efforts to advance the science, and their work has borne enormous fruit. Meteorology is going strong in the Southern Hemisphere, and it’s down to people such as these. More power to them.