Association of Polar Early Career Scientists

 

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is currently accepting abstract submissions for the 2019 Fall Meeting. The meeting will be held 9-13 December 2019 in San Francisco, California. See also the conference website: AGU Fall Meeting homepage. See here the invitations for abstract submissions for several sessions at AGU.

 

SESSION A066: Extratropical and High-latitude Storms, Teleconnections, Extreme Events, and the Rapidly Changing Polar Climate

Conveners: Xiangdong Zhang, Kent Moore, and James E. Overland

Synoptic storms and large-scale teleconnections are prominent dynamic drivers for daily-to-decadal climate variability in the extratropics and high-latitudes and can interplay with external forcings to contribute to long-term climate change. Storms often bring extreme events, including heavy rainfall or snowfall, high winds, large ocean waves and surges, coastal flooding and erosion, abrupt temperature increases, and rapid sea ice loss. Teleconnections link polar and lower latitude climate and play modulating roles in storm activities. Storms and teleconnections have demonstrated systematic changes, leading to alterations of feedback processes and contributing to anomalous variability and changes of climate. This session provides a venue to present progress on extratropical and high-latitude storm activities, teleconnections between extratropics/tropics and the polar regions, resulting extreme events, and underlying physical processes (e.g. stratosphere-troposphere coupling, Rossby wave and jet stream dynamics, wave-mean flow interactions), along with the rapidly changing polar climate, as well as associated ecosystem- and societal impacts.

For more information and to submit an abstract to this session, go to:
Session webpage

For questions about this session, contact:
Xiangdong Zhang
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Phone: 336-850-0566

Kent Moore
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James Overland
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SESSION B128: Vulnerability of Permafrost Carbon to Climate Change
Conveners: Christina Schaedel and Elaine Pegoraro

Permafrost carbon (C) remains one of the most important C cycle feedbacks to climate, with implications for global society. Permafrost region soils contain 1440-1600 billion tons of C; release of just a fraction of this pool as carbon dioxide and methane can accelerate climate change. Permafrost degradation can change ecosystem C storage by enhancing microbial activity and ecosystem respiration, but can also stimulate plant growth and increase C stored in vegetation and surface soil. This session invites papers that examine factors causing losses and gains in permafrost C that contribute to current observations and future projections of changing permafrost C through time. Papers may address any aspect of this topic from microbial communities to the global scale, using a range of field or laboratory measurements or modeling to detect and forecast permafrost thaw and the influence on the C cycle and future climate.

For more information and to submit an abstract to this session, go to:
Session webpage

For questions about this session, contact:
Christina Schaedel
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Phone: 405-371-3350

 

SESSION C026: Observations, Interactions, and Implications of Permafrost Systems in Transition
Conveners: Sarah G. Evans, Melissa Karine Ward, Matthias Fuchs, and Cathy Jean Wilson

Permafrost terrains in high latitude and alpine regions exert a primary control on geophysical, hydrologic, geomorphic, and biotic properties and processes including ecosystem fluxes and thermokarst/thermal erosion. As global air temperatures increase, and permafrost degrades, it is crucial to understand how interactions and feedbacks of these processes will be altered, as well as more accurate measures of permafrost distribution, characteristics, and dynamics. This session welcomes studies across cryosphere, earth surface, global environmental change, and hydrology disciplines that explore ongoing changes and/or enhance permafrost region process understanding. These include, but are not limited to, studies using field observations, remote sensing, geophysical techniques, experiments, and numerical modeling. Conveners are particularly interested in submissions that deal with thermokarst and thaw-related landscape dynamics with impacts on landscape-scale processes, infrastructure, society, health, and the cryosphere. Contributions that include interdisciplinary approaches or demonstrate the development of new techniques, data integration, and/or highlight challenges are strongly encouraged.

For more information and to submit an abstract to this session, go to:
Session webpage

For questions about this session, contact:
Melissa Ward Jones
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Phone: 907-565-9034

 

SESSION ED008: Bright STaRS: Bright Students Training as Research Scientists Poster Session
Conveners: Jennifer Saltzman, Carla McAuliffe, and Janet Warburton

High and middle school students are producing quality Earth, space, and ocean scientific research in summer, in-school, and after-school programs. These students are readily exposed to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math practices and are often encouraged and involved with adults and/or scientists to investigate Earth, space, and ocean attributes including testing variables and monitoring the environment. The goal of this poster session is to give grade 6-12 students a platform to communicate their research to scientists, educators, and peers in order to gain best practice research and presentation skills. The science should be presented through art or poster format by students themselves. Grade 6-12 students throughout the world are encouraged to connect with conveners to submit their projects well in advance of the abstract deadline.  The lead author on the abstract must be a Grade 6-12 student. This session is sponsored by the AGU Education section.

For more information and to submit an abstract to this session, go to:
Session webpage


SESSION ED040: Making Science Relevant: Strategies for Communicating about Science to Broad Audiences
Conveners: Regina Brinker and Janet Warburton

Improving scientific literacy strengthens a community’s skills to use information and think critically about the world around them. Scientific literacy takes science literacy - an understanding of science facts - and applies this information to a broader context. Building a strong network of scientists, formal, and informal educators, media specialists, and communication experts strengthens communication skills and broadens impacts of messages. Conveners invite presentations in effective communication strategies, examples of successful formal and informal education outreach activities, and use of social media to share their science messages both from the field and in the community.

For more information and to submit an abstract to this session, go to:
Session webpage


SESSION ED043: Reaching the Researcher: Collaborations between the Education and the Scientific Communities for the Advancement of STEM and Geosciences
Conveners: Janet Warburton, Constance E. Walker, and Susan Meabh Kelly

From teacher-researcher experiences, research experiences with undergraduates, to student-researcher mentorships, there are a myriad of possible ways to collaborate with a researcher. These collaborations can have pitfalls and/or be a resounding success. In this session conveners want to explore the following questions: (1) What makes some collaborations more successful than others? (2) How does one approach a researcher to start collaborations? (3) How is success measured in these collaborations?  In this session, conveners invite presentations that demonstrate the capacity to build successful collaborations with the scientific community and measure or evaluate the impact for both the researcher and participants of such collaborations.

For more information and to submit an abstract to this session, go to:
Session webpage

 

SESSION GC040: High-Latitude Earth Systems – From Process-Level Understanding to Advanced Regional Predictive Capabilities
Conveners: Wieslaw Maslowski, Renu Joseph, Hailong Wang, and Wilbert Weijer

The dynamics of polar regions is of high societal relevance due to their response to, and impact on, global climate change, including sea level rise, atmosphere/ocean heat transport, carbon storage, extreme events, etc. To address such issues, advancements are required in process-level understanding and coupling within the high-latitude Earth systems, integrating observational and modeling efforts from regional to global scales.
This session focuses on progress and challenges in observing and modeling the high-latitude environment, including syntheses of field measurements and modeling, and Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) results. Conveners solicit presentations that advance understanding of (i) the operation of individual components of the polar Earth systems and their coupling, (ii) internal and external drivers of polar climate change, and (iii) their linkages to lower latitudes and to extreme events. Contributions on (iv) reducing model biases and (v) uncertainty in prediction of future high-latitude change are also strongly encouraged.

For more information and to submit an abstract to this session, go to:
Session webpage

For questions about this session, contact:
Wieslaw Maslowski
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Phone: 831-656-3162

 

SESSION OS021: Linkages Between the Arctic Ocean and the Earth Energy Imbalance
Conveners: Wieslaw Maslowski, Robert Osinski, and Younjoo Lee

Oceanic heat content (OHC) is the primary contributor to the Earth Energy Imbalance, which is a fundamental metrics of climate change. Some of the largest uncertainty in OHC estimates are associated with polar and shelf regions. The Arctic Ocean consists of a large fraction of shallow marginal seas, which control its exchanges with the lower latitude oceans. Also, the surface energy and freshwater budgets have been modulated by a declining sea ice cover and Arctic amplification. Thus, the combined changes in Arctic-wide energy imbalance are likely of relative importance to the global energy imbalance and climate change.

This session focuses on progress and challenges in observing and modeling the Arctic Ocean, including its role within the fully coupled Earth system. Conveners solicit presentations that advance understanding of Arctic energy imbalance, changing hydrography and dynamics, and Arctic-subarctic mass and property fluxes in a hierarchy of ocean and coupled Earths system models.

For more information and to submit an abstract to this session, go to:
Session webpage

For questions about this session, contact:
Wieslaw Maslowski
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Phone: 831-656-3162

 

SESSION PA027: Growing Pains: Overcoming Obstacles and Working Together to Improve Research Collaboration in Science
Conveners: Brit Myers, Pips Veazey, and Kaare Erickson

“Growing Convergence Research” is currently one of the National Science Foundation’s “10 Big Ideas” focusing research investment. Defined as a means for solving complex problems focused on societal needs, convergence research entails integrating knowledge, methods, and expertise across disciplines and forming novel frameworks to catalyze scientific discovery and innovation.

A number of NSF's other “Big Ideas” also emphasize research convergence. For example, with the recent Navigating the New Arctic proposals, considerable effort was made to initiate new project partnerships across disciplines, institutions, and knowledge systems. However, challenges and barriers to building diverse scientific partnerships, teams, and communities remain.

This session invites abstracts exploring convergence and trans-disciplinary research project approaches and frameworks; the development and facilitation of successful research teams and communities; and ideas for community-wide strategies promoting equitable and effective collaborations across disciplines and knowledge systems.

For more information and to submit an abstract to this session, go to:
Session webpage

 

SESSION PA052: Science to Action: Having Social Impact Amid Institutional Barriers
Conveners: Daniel B. Ferguson, Julie A. Vano, and David H. Behar

Much environmental research will never have the social impact that it could because it is carried out in institutions that are bound to traditional approaches misaligned with current needs and developed without active engagement with decision makers. Connecting environmental science to environmental problems is more than good science communication or writing a “broader impacts” statement, yet these are too often approaches put forward as pathways to bring science out of the lab and into the real world. This session will highlight environmental change research having demonstrable impact in the world despite institutional barriers. If you collaborate on sea level rise projections with a coastal city, work in a climate services organization that supports municipal infrastructure planning, model disease vector spread related to warming climate with a health department, or do other science that is both socially and scientifically impactful, join us to share how these barriers can be overcome.

For more information and to submit an abstract to this session, go to:
Session webpage

For questions about this session, contact:
Dan Ferguson
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

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