2011 AGU Fall Meeting: Session Proposal and Abstract Submission Dates

Dear GEC Members,

It is already that time of the year again to submit session proposals for the 2011 AGU Fall Meeting, to be held 5-9 December at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif. A record number of researchers attended last year (almost 19,000!). GEC sessions have been dramatically increasing in popularity, up from 82 abstracts in 2004 to almost 900 in 2010! In order to meet the challenges of the growing attendance, AGU has decided to move forward session proposal and abstract submission deadlines this year. The key dates for the 2011 Fall Meeting are:

1. Session proposal submission opens 25 February and closes 20 April; and
2. Abstract submissions open 8 June and close 4 August.

It is the vision and creativity of the session conveners that shape the meeting. Keep in mind that broad and interdisciplinary sessions have a greater chance of attracting many abstracts, and thus more oral presentation allocations. Please remember that even if a session proposal is accepted, its status as an oral or a poster session is large determined by the number of abstracts received. Invited presenters may end up delivering an invited poster rather than a talk if the overall session does not receive enough abstract submissions to warrant an oral session. If overall abstract submissions to the Fall Meeting continue to rise, more sessions will likely be poster-only, as the number of available lecture halls is limited. This means that it is up to the session proposers/conveners to take the initiative to advertise their session(s) and solicit abstracts. Also, in the interest of maximizing the opportunity for oral talks, those receiving a small number of abstract submissions are often consolidated with other sessions presenting a similar topic.

Our special sessions on AGU Authors and the new Stephen Schneider GEC Lecture were very well attended last year. We encourage you to contact us (below) directly if you have ideas about novel special sessions that GEC might sponsor at this year’s annual meeting.

We encourage students and young scientists to propose sessions, but strongly recommend that they team up with well-established scientists in their fields when doing so.

To submit a session proposal or for more information, please visit the AGU Web site.

We are looking forward to your session proposals.

Best regards,

Don Wuebbles, GEC Chair
Steve Lloyd and Figen Mekik, GEC Program Committee