This is one of a series of blog posts on the Journeys of Dr. G blog for the 2015 AGU Fall Meeting. Feel free to read my posts for pre-meeting, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, we’ve had some pretty famous people here at the AGU Meeting this week – Elon Musk, Al Gore, and today, zipping through the Exhibit Hall, was R2-D2! I was able to make it over there to grab a selfie with him! As AGU is doing a special screening of the latest Star Wars movie this evening, I’m not surprised he would come over and check out the latest and greatest in science and technology! (and it served as the foundation for some amusing tweets, too)

I started my day in the Speaker Ready Room. This is a room filled with computers for meeting presenters to upload their PowerPoint slides (if they didn’t do it online ahead of time) and/or check to see that their slides will display correctly on the conference center computers. The worst thing that can happen to a presenter is to have their slides not display correctly! In the 15-minute time slot speakers are given, there is no time to go back and edit. As I have a talk tomorrow, I did a double-check of my presentations – looks great!

I then headed to a session titled The Role of Scientists as Communicators. I saw some talks that ranged from using comedy to podcasting to reach different audiences and to help them understand science. It would have been great to stay for the entire session, but then I was off to the Communicating Your Science: Ask the Experts session, part of AGU’s Sharing Science initiative. Because of my blogging and use of social media for professional purposes, I was asked by AGU to head a discussion table on social media. I had some people stop by with great questions on getting started and how to become part of a community online. It was fun to be able to share my experiences, and I wish them great success! (and I’m going to keep my eye out for the person I spoke to that is going to do a Tumblr on climate science in both English and German!)

Next up was an interview for the AGUniverse! Stay tuned, and I’ll post a video that was recorded of me today describing why I’m a part of the AGUniverse. Fortunately, because I speak in front of you students all the time, the interview was quick and went smoothly.

After grabbing a quick lunch, I headed over to a Town Hall session by the NASA Seal Level Change Team. The project has 20 principal investigators with an additional 30 project leaders to address – what else – sea level changes! Here’s a description of the Town Hall:

In 2014, the NASA Sea Level Change Team (N-SLCT) was formed to address challenges in sea level change research. Sea level change is a consequence of exchange of water between the land, atmosphere, and oceans – including ice masses and land hydrology – as well as changes in ocean heat content and movements of the solid earth. Scientists from these disciplines have joined the N-SLCT to enhance our knowledge of the coupled system using the vast network of NASA satellite observations and provide insights into the past, present, and future of sea level change. A new web portal has been built to provide a one-stop shop for current NASA sea level data, information on sea level research and the N-SLCT team. The website provides updates on research progress in sea level science as well as background information on the causes and mechanisms. Data analysis tools help to visualize NASA data and compare different quantities of interest, such as sea surface heights, ocean temperatures, ice mass change, among others, on a global scale. Here, we present the ongoing work of the N-SLCT and an overview of the N-SLCT Web Portal that will launch in November 2015 at http://sealevel.nasa.gov

Students, you MUST check out their website for the latest news and data in sea level research, as well as great multimedia materials and references you can use in course projects (for those of you taking oceanography with me in the summer (GEOSC 040), you can bet you will be visiting this site!).

After diving into my Inbox and getting through some of the more urgent emails, I headed over to the Student Lounge for the daily meeting I’m required to have with my AGU Meeting Mentee. Kimberly and I chatted for over an hour, and then I grabbed an early dinner before heading over to Bella Gaia. I’ve included a video preview of this artistic event, a mixture of of NASA images, data visualizations, and music and dance. It was such a powerful event, and what a way to get people engaged with, and then talking about, our planet. After the performance was a panel with a former NASA astronaut and scientists to discuss this collaboration and the status of our planet in the Anthropocene.

The end of the conference is almost here! Friday is the final day (and my final presentation!).