This year’s American Meteorological Society’s 105th Annual meeting was held in New Orleans from 12th – 16th January 2025. The primary aim of these annual meetings is to bring together all the leading researchers and students who are working in the field of meteorology. It was my first time in the United States, my first AMS meeting and it lived up to my expectations.<\/p>\n
Out of the multiple symposiums and conferences which run in parallel, I attended the 29th<\/sup> Conference on Integrated Observing and Assimilation Systems for the Atmosphere, Oceans, and Land Surface (IAOS-AOLS). It is a conference specially dedicated to the advances in data assimilation (DA).<\/p>\n
Presentations<\/strong><\/h4>\n
The conference kicked off with some interesting presentations from invited speakers about the challenges that DA face associated with high resolution, multiscale, and large number of diverse and complex observations. The first talk by ECMWF\u2019s Massimo Bonavita on the possibility for DA and machine learning (ML) to work together was quite eye-catching in his aptly defined title \u201cData Assimilation and Machine Learning: Evolution or Revolution?\u201d From DARC, Amos Lawless was one of the presenters who gave a great talk about the role of DA in the Earth system digital twin. Sarah Dance was among one of the panellists who emphasised the ever-increasing need for DA experts.<\/p>\n
The Consortium for Advanced Data Assimilation Research and Education<\/strong><\/h4>\n
The other sessions had a number of talks by researchers from the Consortium for Advanced Data Assimilation Research and Education (CADRE). One of CADRE\u2019s aims is to improve short range, medium range and sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) predictions through JEDI (Joint Effort for Data Assimilation Integration). CADRE also has an ongoing collaboration with the University of Reading and the UK Met Office. As a part of it, I was invited by CADRE director Xuguang Wang to attend a side meeting. We discussed the challenges to DA in terms of workforce and skills and the need to broaden cross-agency and community-wide activities.<\/p>\n
Posters and booths<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Apart from the oral presentations, the meeting had several poster sessions on DA. There were also many booths in the Exhibit Hall comprising of various research institutions like NOAA, ECMWF, NASA, NCAR and companies like AccuWeather, Meteomatics, and ESRI. They were impressive in making everyone aware of their products and future plans. Some of the booths also had some free goodies to offer which attracted specially a lot of students.<\/p>\nThe booth from NASA (left), L3HARRIS (behind) and National Weather Center (right) in the Exhibit Hall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
My contribution<\/strong><\/h4>\n
On a personal note, I got the chance to chair a session titled “Data Assimilation in Numerical Weather Prediction” on the last day of the conference. There I also presented my work “A Comparative Study of Diagnostic and Metrological Estimates of Spatial and Temporal Error Correlations for AMSU-A Type Observations”. My talk was well received, \u00a0and it led to a good discussion later with some intriguing ideas for future work.<\/p>\n
Overall it was a great experience in terms of networking and getting to know leading researchers in the field of DA and numerical weather prediction. It helped me to stay updated with the state of the art, to showcase my own work to DA experts, and to get wonderful insights on my research work. It was nice to see the DA community still growing and thriving meaning that conventional NWP still has a lot to offer in the exciting times of ML and AI. I cannot wait to be at the next AMS meeting in 2026 in Houston, Texas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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