I keep hearing that life has slowed down since the pandemic started 10-plus months ago. But whoever is saying that has not seen the work produced by the EESM scientists working on research funded by Regional & Global Model Analysis (RGMA).

Since our last newsletter in October, we held a very successful RGMA PI Meeting. There were more than 150 presentations over three and a half days, including breakout sessions, and discussions. Learn more about this meeting in this edition of the RGMAgram newsletter.

We partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in November for the NOAA-DOE Precipitation Processes and Predictability Workshop, which focused on building a better understanding of precipitation predictability and the physical processes that are key to precipitation biases.

We barely had time to catch our collective breath when the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting started on December 1 and ran through December 17. After a brief respite during the holidays, you—the RGMA community—were at it again during the 2021 American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting. Learn more about the activity of your RGMA colleagues.

Each of these major events helped demonstrate the impressive breadth of research across the RGMA community. The events also brought to mind that there are many opportunities to form connections—to reach out to other RGMA researchers and gain new perspectives on our research.

We already see this being done with great success. The WACCEM, CASCADE, and HyperFACETS teams have joint monthly teleconferences focused on the Extremes and the Water-Cycle, as do the CATALYST and PCMDI teams that focus on Modes of Variability and Cloud interactions. Meanwhile, the HiLAT-RASM, RUBISCO efforts have their own communities with a focus on High-latitude Processes and Biogeochemical feedbacks respectively. If you would like to be involved in any of these, please email me.

As we start a new year, our goal is success for you and your research teams. We want RGMA to be a Collaboratory—a center to foster research without regard to physical location, a forum for interaction with colleagues, data, and resources.

If you have challenges, questions, or new ideas, please reach out to us. Let us know what’s going on in your project. We want to know, and we want to help you make those essential connections.

Finally, I would like to personally and sincerely thank Cristiana Stan, who joined us last spring under an Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) assignment. Her work here came to a close recently, and she has returned to George Mason University. During her brief time with us, Cristiana made significant contributions. She helped us launch the RGMAgram newsletter and was responsible for much of the RGMA PI Meeting’s success. In addition to supporting RGMA and our PIs, she worked closely with and contributed to excellent outcomes for the MultiSector Dynamics and Earth System Model Development program areas. We look forward to the opportunity to working with more IPAs again in the future!

— Renu Joseph, RGMA Program Manager