Reactivit'Air

Rather than heading to Vienna as I did last year for the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union, I attended its online replacement this year: Sharing Geoscience Online ( #shareEGU20 ). As everyone knows, online meetings should happen more often because it's better for the climate and because we do have the technology nowadays to make it happen easily. While some (including scientists) have already been taking advantage of this possibility for a while, the current pandemic is forcing almost everyone else to do the same. As most people, I happen to have been on video calls with a few people to discuss results from my research or plan upcoming measurement campaigns. However, I don't recall participating ever in an online conference before last week. I thought that I would make a short (and extremely subjective) comparison between the in-person and the online versions of the EGU General Assembly. Let me know in the comments about your own experience with this ...

This year was my first time at the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Even though it felt overwhelming at times, it is also a very stimulating conference including sessions related to important topics beyond scientific topics, such as short courses about various subjects (e.g. peer-review, grants) and more general sessions about scientists' well-being and diversity and equality for instance. The EGU General Assembly (GA) is a week-long conference taking place yearly in Vienna since 2005 (the first GA was in Nice, France, in 2004). It is huge (really!) and brings together over 16'000 scientists (new record this year) from 113 countries representing all fields related to space and Earth Science, such as atmospheric sciences, climate science, oceanography, biogeosciences, cryosphere research, hydrology, seismology, volcanology, planetary science, among many others. As the Atmospheric Sciences division is on of the largest of EGU and as I have be...