Emily LakdawallaDec 06, 2013

Attend the 2013 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union virtually

Next week is the annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), an enormous gathering of geoscientists of all varieties that occurs every year at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. They expect 22,000 attendees. Most are Earth scientists, but planetary sciences and solar physicists are represented too. The scientific program can be accessed here.

To be honest, I find AGU's size to be intimidating and exhausting. I much prefer smaller meetings like the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference and the Division for Planetary Sciences annual meeting, where you stand a better chance of encountering people in the hallways for illuminating informal conversations. These just don't seem to happen at AGU. On the plus side, AGU is such a large meeting that the press room is always packed, so it provides a rare opportunity for me to meet many of my journalistic peers in person.

AGU is putting increasing effort into making it possible to attend some sessions virtually; here is a whole page full of planned webstreamed sessions. In order to attend a virtual session, you need to jump through a couple of hoops, pre-registering here and verifying your email address, then "buy" your free access using the promotion code AGU13.

The planetary science sessions to be livestreamed are as follows. They will also be available for on-demand viewing within 24 hours of filming. Ones listed as "on-demand only" will not be livestreamed. All times are Pacific (UTC-8).

There is also a full schedule of press briefings planned, and they will be webstreamed. Here's the schedule of space science press briefings:

As for me, I will be attending in person on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. Most of Monday and some of Tuesday will be taken up with Curiosity results. On Tuesday I also plan to attend the press briefings on Juno's Earth flyby, Mars, and comet ISON. On Friday I will be chairing a session on "The Era of Citizen Science: Intersection of Outreach, Scientific Research and Big Data." I'll post more about that next week. And Friday will wrap up with a session on Europa.

I'm sure I'll be Tweeting up a storm, and will try to compose a blog post or a few. Casey Dreier will be attending AGU all week, as will Mark Hilverda, so follow them, too. You can try following the hashtag #AGU13 but it will be a firehose of information. In the past, it has helped stem the flow for me to search Twitter using "#AGU13 -RT" to suppress retweets.

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