IAMC Scientific Steering Committee meeting of April 11, 2022 – summary

The last monthly meeting of the IAMC Scientific Steering Committee meeting (SSC) took place on April 11th, 2022. It was decided that this year’s Annual Meeting (November 28th – December 2nd) will take place in person, hosted by the University of Maryland (USA), with a portfolio of online events as part of the programme. Presentations in oral sessions (keynote sessions, and parallel oral sessions) will be held in-person, with attendance both in-person and online. We will have two kinds of poster sessions: fully online and fully in-person. Presenters in fully in-person sessions can present their poster also at the fully online sessions if they wish to. Sessions in-person will be organised according to Maryland’s time zone. Interventions that will help to mitigate the inconveniences that this may create for participants based in regions in inconvenient time zones will be prepared, such as making the recording of sessions immediately available for participants for a certain period of time. We hope that this model will provide the appropriate framework for another inspiring and intellectually stimulating meeting. We are doing our best to identify a format that responds to the needs of our Consortium, managing the uncertainties that still exist regarding the organisation of the event, maximising the inclusion of those who don’t have a travel budget or prefer not to travel, providing a platform for those who wish to meet in person again, and minimizing the difficulties generated by the time zones differences. The discussion on the traditional call for abstracts is expected to be launched by the end of May, in particular focusing on the list of topics for which submissions are desirable. Finally, the SSC members who attended the AR6 approval plenary meeting shared their impressions, identifying critical points and possible frontier research topics relevant to the IAMC Community.