On 8th-13th April more than 15 thousand scientists, researchers and students gathered in Vienna at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly, including 9 students and 5 members of staff of the MPE CDT.
The General Assembly consists of 22 different Divisions covering a wide range of topics from Atmospheric Sciences (AS) to Tectonics & Structural Geology. These include Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences (NP), in which most MPE CDT students and staff gave presentations.
Carlo Cafaro (Cohort 2014) kick-started the MPE CDT presentations with his poster in the Atmospheric Convection (AS1.37) Session on Monday 9th April about his project at the Met Office last summer. Tsz Yan Leung (Cohort 2016) followed on Wednesday morning with a highlighted talk in the Inverse Problems, Data Assimilation and Predictability Studies in Geophysics (NP5.1) Session. The same afternoon Carlo presented his second poster within the Advances in Statistical Post-processing for Deterministic and Ensemble Forecasts (NP5.3) Session.
The new Mathematics of Planet Earth (NP1.1) Session, convened by Valerio Lucarini with several other members of the CDT staff, amongst others, was held full-day on Thursday, probably the most intensive day for most of us. Oana Lang (Cohort 2015), Lea Olijaca (Cohort 2015) and Giulia Carigi (Cohort 2016) gave oral presentations during the day, and Birgit Sützl (Cohort 2016), Golo Wimmer (Cohort 2016), Goodwin Gibbins (Cohort 2015) and Joshua Prettyman (Cohort 2014) displayed their posters.
The CDT staff also presented at this MPE Session. Darryl Holm gave a talk titled ‘Stochastic partial differential equations as a diffusive limit of deterministic Lagrangian multi-time dynamics’ and Dan Crisan, Tobias Kuna, Jochen Bröcker and Valerio Lucarini presented posters. Darryl, Jochen and Valerio also presented in various other NP Sessions, and Valerio gave a Short Course about climate response as a problem in statistical mechanics.
Packed with oral, poster and PICO presentations from 8.30am to 7pm every day, the week was very engaging for us. Despite its overwhelming size, the General Assembly provided us with many opportunities to network (especially during the poster sessions), and was a great occasion to update ourselves the forefront of research in our fields of interests. On this theme, the most relevant topics have been Predictability, Data Assimilation, Dynamical Systems Approaches to Problems in Geosciences and Numerical Weather prediction, just to mention a few!
Last but not least, the week in Vienna was an amazing opportunity for intra-cohort and cross-cohort socialising. Indeed, working hard could only come with playing hard. We went out for a few dinners during the week, including the wider NP Division dinner on Thursday. Those who were still around after the General Assembly hanged out for the weekend for some sightseeing as well. We are blessed to have Birgit, a Viennese herself, taking us around and introducing us the local places. These turned out to be great socialising opportunities within the MPE community.
Reported by: Giulia Carigi and Adrian Leung
