Sunday, December 11, 2011

AGU 2011 aftermath

The previous post was actually written during the break before Gavin's session on the CMIP5 models, which turned out to be one of the better ones. Mind you, the analyses were substantially less thorough than most authors had promised/intended when they wrote their abstracts, due to limited data availability. For what it's worth, the executive summary is that the CMIP5 model projections seem to be broadly similar to CMIP3 so far. I would not be surprised if the IPCC deadlines slipped a bit, like they did last time. In fact they have already slipped compared to the timetable that was originally proposed, but for some time now the deadline for submitted manuscripts (to be citable in the report) has been July next year. To date there are very few paleo-related runs on the database (6 mid-Holocene, 1 LGM and 2 last millennium last time I checked) which makes it hard to see how this facet of the project can be included at all in the WCRP CMIP5 workshop in Hawaii in March - the deadline for abstract submission is this week, and: "To demonstrate that your analysis has already begun, you are encouraged to include a description of your preliminary analysis so far". Will be interesting to see how that pans out...

Anyway, Gavin's speakers made a good effort to be energetic and interesting, and jules said the parallel session on paleo modelling was also good. Friday afternoon last year was also one of the highlights. After, we went out to dinner with the Bristol bunch, and had 15 different types of meat grilled in Brazilian style. It was a fun but rather late night after a long week. Overall, we had a rather better time than last year, and my cold and sore throat waited until we had returned before coming on. I'm actually quite looking forward to white rice and miso, for a day or two at least.

Sadly our flight home was delayed, so we missed our annual Christmas carol service that we were expecting to get back for. It's the first time we have been significantly late at Narita for as long as we can remember.

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