Everyone presenting (both oral and poster) and/or attending the 96th AMS Annual Meeting must register and wear a badge. Early registration rates are valid through Tuesday, 1 December 2015. Registrations forms faxed or mailed to AMS Headquarters will be accepted until 15 December 2015. Online registrations will be accepted throughout the conference. Preregistration forms must be accompanied by one of the following forms of payment: check (personal/business/traveler's), money order, purchase order, or credit card number (MasterCard/VISA/American Express). Foreign checks must be drawn on a U.S. bank and made payable in U.S. dollars. Confirmation of registration will be sent once the form is processed. Refunds (less a $25 processing fee) will be granted only for cancellations received before 22 December 2015. Click here for more information on registration.

This year’s Presidential Forum reflects upon the American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meeting theme, "Earth System Science in Service to Society" that provides participants a better understanding of living through extreme events. Our society continues to experience the effects of more and more extreme events like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and drought, some as a result of our changing climate and others as a result of our expanding population. The AMS needs to continue to address lessons learned, and more importantly, identify what future actions it will take to help mitigate the impact of these devastating life-changing events. To highlight this, we’ve invited an outstanding panel of speakers – Admiral Thad Allen, United States Coast Guard (ret), Executive Vice President Booz Allen Hamilton; Max Mayfield, Director, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Hurricane Center (ret); Dr. Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Dr. Shirley Laska, Professor Emerita, and founding past Director of the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology, University of New Orleans. Moderator Maureen McCann, News 13 Orlando, will lead a discussion of the panelists' personal experiences during Hurricane Katrina and Deepwater Horizon. The panel will also address AMS’s current activities that encompass research and forecasting of events and inspire our members to embrace a renewed sense of purpose as they direct our Society in the coming years.

Kick-off session for the Symposium on Weather, Water and Climate Enterprise

This panel discussion will bring together experts from the weather and climate enterprise to discuss how the community contributes to business continuity practices, managing supply chains during extreme weather events, and the influence on capital markets. This session will also highlight recent extreme events which caused significant global supply chain impacts and how active planning for future events can mitigate financial impacts.

Please join other attendees for the Opening Reception of the 2016 Annual Meeting, sponsored by the exhibiting companies. Local government officials and other dignitaries will be present for the ribbon-cutting event.

Abstract: Cities in the world’s developing countries are experiencing dramatic growth. The United Nations estimates the world’s urban population will increase from about half to nearly 60% of the world’s population within just two decades. This growth is stressing the ability of resource infrastructure needed to support that growth. Despite the extension of improved water supplies to more than a billion urban residents over the past two decades, the development of water resources infrastructure is lagging the explosive population growth, particularly in Africa and Asia. This is true especially for sanitation and waste water management, but also for both domestic water quantity and quality. Furthermore, droughts and floods disproportionately affect cities in the developing world, with impacts falling most heavily on the poor because slums are frequently located in flood-prone areas and not connected to centralized water supply and waste-water networks. Water supplies for many of these cities are also vulnerable to international boundary water resource management issues where multiple countries have jurisdiction over a watershed or an aquifer. Trans-boundary water resource management issues, exacerbated by population growth, geographic redistribution, and climate change, add a layer of complication to problems faced by cities of developing and developed nations. Further, water resource management challenges are exacerbated by extremes and changes in weather and climate, such as changes in evapotranspiration and in the frequency and intensity of precipitation. Improved understanding and predictions of these changes are key to addressing better water resource management. The Hydrological Ensemble Prediction Eperiment (HEPEX), an international project to advance technologies for hydrological forecasting, has the potential to provide needed forecasts to mitigate problems suffered by urban populations in developing countries and others. The AMS science community could support this growing population with the science enterprise it represents. Application of environmental forecasts and data such as atmospheric and hydrologic variables has considerable potential to inform sustainable water management and effective infrastructure investment in these areas This session invites presentations in the above areas, specifically forecasting and mitigating impacts of floods and droughts faced by urban poor, HEPEX products and services, and trans-boundary water management issues. Both U.S. and non-U.S. authors are encouraged to submit abstracts.

How does our community expect to continue to improve climate services to help society mitigate and adapt to climate variability and change? (NIDIS, IPCC, lessons learned from high impact events)

(e.g., financial, insurance, transportation, agricultural, health, energy, etc.)

In the face of increased public and Federal awareness and concern over high-impact weather and ocean events globally and the changing climate environment, a number of calls have appeared in the literature seeking revolutionary collaboration among research sponsors and operational environmental prediction agencies and between the weather and climate communities to significantly advance our prediction capability to benefit mitigation, response and policy. Two partnership have been combined: National Unified Operational Prediction Capability (NUOPC and Earth System Prediction Capability have been combined in the National Earth System Prediction Capability (ESPC). National EPSC represents part of the U.S. response to this need for improved coordination of research towards more skillful and extended range operational environmental prediction. Synoptic/sub-seasonal to seasonal global earth system models are under development at several U.S. centers consisting of high-resolution atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, land, and near space components with the goal of seamless prediction at lead times from a few hours to months or years in operations by 2025. The National ESPC addresses the scientific, technical, computational, and organizational challenges to meet this ambitious goal.

Often climate models and data are complex and built for use by climate scientists, but what about the decision makers looking for climate information to make decisions? Creating information from climate data and models involves making the data easy to understand and useful to citizen scientists and non-scientists alike. How can climate experts provide outlooks on climate useful for decisions on policy, infrastructure, resources, and life and safety? Some issues related to providing this information include data/model uncertainty, sampling errors, spatial resolution, model down-scaling, visualization, liability, and risk management, to name a few. This panel will discuss plans, strategies, challenges, perspectives, technologies, and the future of climate change information and services for society.

In order to meet the growing needs of a diverse range of information users and constituents, the delivery of timely and effective climate services frequently requires collaboration across geopolitical boundaries. This session will explore the opportunities, obstacles, and evolving solutions associated with transboundary climate services, drawing upon concrete experiences within the North American Climate Services Partnership (NACSP). A panel of international climate services practitioners, including both government and academic, will provide their perspectives on the challenges and benefits of transboundary work, and session attendees will also be invited to share their transboundary experiences in a dialogue with the panel. Specific examples and lessons learned from sectoral and user engagement in the weather, water and climate enterprise will be highlighted - at both the continental and regional/boundary geographic scales - drawn from the portfolio of NACSP activities in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Outcomes from the session will be used to foster a broader dialogue on the unique nature of cross-boundary collaborations, refine the priorities of NACSP going forward, and provide a framework for reporting these opportunities, obstacles, and evolving solutions in the climate services literature.