This year, I attended my first annual European Meteorological Society (EMS) annual meeting. The conference was held in Barcelona and lasted for the entire first week of September, with up to five parallel sessions at a time. My attendance to this conference also allowed me to attend the EMS general assembly on the Sunday prior to the start of the conference as a representative of the Irish Meteorological Society.
When I got to the venue on Sunday, I greeted people by the door, introduced myself, and asked them where they were from. I was there representing the Irish Meteorological Society because no other more senior member could attend, so imagine my surprise when they told me they came from Ireland. They urged me to take a seat at the table, as I was the one representing Ireland. This is how I met Paul Halton, the former head of numerical modelling at Met Éireann.
The general assembly was quite interesting to attend. The first part of it was centered on very administrative parts such as the approval of the minutes from the previous meeting or a review of the accounts. Then, a few interesting ongoing projects and progressions were discussed. First, the EMS is planning to reach net zero emissions by 2040, which has implications for the coming years for anyone on EMS business, as well as on the selection of future locations. A part of these measures include the pledge to work with publishers to reach net-zero emissions in publications. Along these lines, the Journal for the EMS is being launched with Elsevier, who have a net zero pledge by 2040, and researchers are being encouraged to submit their articles to this new journal.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the general assembly was the discussion on the EMS webinar series. Since March of this year, a monthly webinars have been held in an effort to maintain the EMS alive all through the year and not only during the annual meetings. This project will be ongoing, as a full year of running the program might be needed to assess its success. We split into working groups to explore possible topics or speakers and then shared them amongst all attendees, trying to give a hand to the person in charge. Previous webinars tried to bridge the gap between meteorology and other disciplines such as art or archaeology, and suggestions ranged from doing webinars along the lines of the plenary talks in the conference, to more career-oriented ones that show students of meteorology possible work opportunities, especially outside of academia.
The session followed with a review of the so-called "terminology project", an initiative of some societies to get a glossary of meteorological terms in different languages. Despite individual glossaries in different societies that explain terms used in their language, the idea of putting it all together does not seem to be moving forward, but societies did agree that the glossaries in each individual language may just be enough. After establishing the agenda for the 2025 general assembly and announcing next year's location in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the general assembly closed and we headed for some snacks, as we headed to the ice breaker a while later.
The talks with the other representatives of meteorological societies, as well as people I knew and people I had just met were very entertaining. Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned was that the president of the Danish meteorological society has a weather station near the Arctic. I also learned that the EMS was hosted in Dublin in 2017, and that one of the presents to attendees was, of course, an umbrella.
Monday started the week of scientific contributions. I first attended an invited talk from a former colleague, who discussed the evolution of the atmospheric boundary layer during a long-term drought period in a semi-arid environment. The session on boundary layer meteorology was interesting, but after the coffee break, I spent the rest of the day attending a session on deriving actionable information from climate data, which gave me some ideas on how to present a part of my research, especially when aiming to a wider audience.
On Tuesday, parallel sessions were all equally far away from my work yet interesting to me. I ended up attending talks on cities and urban areas in the earth-atmosphere system, followed by some sessions on mountain meteorology. I learned some things from both of them. In terms of cities, I learned that there is something called the luxury effect, which basically links the hotter areas in a city to the lower income. Now, this did not apply to Madrid (the case study in the presentation), as the city center is filled with high-income people while being the hottest part of the city. Along these lines, the role of parks came up a few times because they act as thermal regulators. In terms of mountain meteorology, there are still problems with the Monin-Obukhov similarity theory, particularly on non-flat terrain, but from what I saw the community has not managed to find a better alternative yet.
Wednesday brought with it the sessions on communication, both in terms of how to communicate uncertainties to the public and on media. The first part on uncertainties was fantastic, with talks discussing how we use ensembles, and how the general public understands probability more than we give them credit for. It was quite enlightening to see the type of experiments being done on this front, and how responses from the public are positive when we perform our job of communicating the uncertainty adequately, especially when the impacts of the forecasts are also discussed. Additionally, I learned a lot about what people in different European institutions are doing in terms of communication with the public, including an effort made from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to prevent misinformation and disinformation in the fields of weather and climate. In the afternoon, I had the opportunity to present along with a colleague a poster that I participated in about the usage of reanalysis for the study of sea breeze events.
On Thursday, the session on energy meteorology finally started, the one that contained my talk and people from my field. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of talks were based on artificial intelligence (AI) methods to improve on the forecasting of both wind and radiation. Most of the presented results showed encouraging results in the reconstruction of time series and spatial patterns, but these were mostly methodological and did not really provide insights into the system itself. This session included my talk, which was on wind and solar ramping events in Ireland and which went great. Perhaps the most curious out of all the presentations was the one on airborne wind energy, a topic which I knew nothing about and that seemed extremely interesting and useful for remote communities.
Thursday afternoon included the poster session for the energy meteorology topic, and despite chatting to several people, I was mostly interested in three main posters. The first, explored the climatology of energy droughts in Japan by reconstructing long-term records and exploring how different planned scenarios for the combination of technologies impact these droughts. It was quite interesting because the effect of wind and solar in the seasons is quite different from the one we are observing in Ireland due to the difference in latitude, and so in climate. The second poster was an analysis of extreme renewable generation events, both on the high and low ends. The aim of this poster was to quantify them for Germany and understand the temporal and spatial patterns behind the most severe event of each type. The last poster that caught my attention discussed the effect of spatial complementarity of wind and solar farms on land with four different sites for offshore wind. Although a site could be linked to the best overall complementarity, different ones performed better for the summer and winter months. This brought up the point that although complementarity with existing installations is important, so is the one between the different new installations.
Friday was the last day of the conference and the energy meteorology was on all day. Although I was expecting three of the talks to be quite interesting based on the abstracts, unfortunately only one of them was truly applicable to my research. It was a talk from a research in the university of Reading that explained the relation between energy shortfall periods in Europe and atmospheric weather regimes. This is something that we are also interested in, so it was a fantastic presentation to attend. Some other interesting talks discussed the effect of streamlining energy variables into numerical weather prediction and the effect of stochastic probabilistic forecasting on renewable generation.
Overall, the conference was a fantastic experience of meeting new people and reconnecting with old acquaintances. It was great to represent the Irish Meteorological Society and experience what the EMS general assembly is like, as well as being on the conference itself. I would really recommend this conference to anyone interested on meteorology in itself or any of the adjacent fields, like biometeorology, agricultural meteorology, and, most importantly, energy meteorology.
