What themes emerged at the AGU 2011 meeting that the MRI community might want to follow up with a Synthesis Workshop, or with a new category of activity that I'll just call a Concerted Effort?

Treeline appeared in many talks and posters, perhaps not surprisingly as Session B12B focused on treelines! I particularly liked W.K. Smith's talk in which he addressed how high elevation treeline environments differed from arctic or antarctic treeline environments, with for instance much higher radiation loads and much lower partial pressures. I noted shortly after the AGU that a recent paper by Malanson et al. in JAAAR proposed next steps in treeline research, so perhaps we don't need a Synthesis Workshop  but rather a Concerted Effort to pursue the lines of inquiry laid out by George, Lynn and Co.  A treeline effort modeled on MIREN(the mountains invasive network with standard protocols, etc.)  might be a viable option.

Many people reported on the use of smart sensor networks. When I asked if there were any platform that supported dialogue among developers and users of such sensor networks, no one seemed to know of any. So we have a very promising approach being developed by many different labs around the world with little interaction. Hmmm, this sounds to me like a good topic for a platform hosted by MRI.

Himalayan glaciers were also the topic of many different projects but it appeared to me that the projects weren't conferring with each other. There were projects funded by USAID, by NASA, by the EU and so on. And there will certainly be a number of papers that appear in the near future that attempt to fill the gap created by the IPCC AR4 gaffe. Still I wonder if a workshop where all the researchers could confront the data and analyses of others would not be a useful adjunct to the appearance of several disconnected summary papers in different journals. The point would not be to eliminate competition or even to seek consensus, but rather to accelerate the process of review and critique.

High resolution analyses and models of mountain meteorology also fascinated me. The role of aerosols in the form of snow, how clouds formed over mountainous islands, the development of jets that impede circulation: it seems that we are still learning quite a lot about the basic mechanisms of mountain meteorology. As climate change occurs physically through changes in these processes, a better understanding of them,  and especially of how changes in forcing will alter them seems like the most effective way to improve our forecasts of climate change.

The MRI Coordination Office has launched a call for new ideas for Synthesis Workshops, some of which might actually be the basis for what I am calling Concerted Efforts. If you want to propose something, click here!