Impressions from the fourth Annual meeting of
the European Meteorological Society (EMS4)

Sven-Erik Gryning (Risø National Laboratory, Denmark)
Ekaterina Batchvarova (National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology, Bulgaria)

The EMS4 conference took place in Nice, France, 26-30 September 2004 in a building named Acropolis. It is a huge construction in the centre of Nice that is very well suited for large conferences –in this one there were about 450 participants. The topics of the conference seem to cover everything of interest for a broadminded meteorologist, and even a narrow-minded meteorologist could find presentations of interest for sure. The main themes being:

• Instruments and methods of observations (28)
• Atmosphere and the water-cycle – a real time look (146)
• Applied Climatology, 5th European Conference on Applied Climatology (237)
• Computing in Earth Sciences (7)
• Information Provisions (24)

where the number in parenthesis indicates the number of presentations of which about half were given as poster-presentations. It can be seen that the number of presentations in each of the themes is very uneven. The titles of the themes were not strictly followed. As an example - the water-cycle theme incorporated a large session on urban meteorology and pollution. The titles should be more precise and descriptive in future events. The building was huge and it was not always easy to find the appropriate seminar room, but a friendly secretariat always willingly gave directions on the location of the seminar rooms to scientists who have lost their way. The large number of posters was on exhibition during the whole conference in a large central hall that everybody had to pass in order to reach the seminar rooms. Furthermore the exhibition room was used for the coffee breaks. This gave an excellent visibility of the posters and many interesting discussions were initiated at the posters during the coffee breaks. In the same hall some instrument development companies and publishing houses had their exhibitions and demonstrations as well, giving an impression of the latest developments in their fields. So all in all it was a very well organized conference with interesting presentations. It was worthwhile to participate.

Nice as a conference town is wonderful with ample of interesting sights and restaurants. The old town was not far away from the conference building and a pleasant place to socialize with colleagues, it is indeed interesting to meet people in such diversified fields. Parallel with the conference the COST (european Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical research) secretariat had organized a number of COST meetings. For COST 715 (Urban meteorology) this provided an opportunity to present main results from 5 years of research in one of the sessions. This was inevitably the last meeting of COST715. Initially we thought the last meetings was in Reading in September 2003 but the COST715 managed to meet again in May 2004 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in connection with the Harmo9 conference, and now once again in the nice Nice. But this time it was clear that we had our final-final COST715 dinner – being the third last dinner - a just wonderful way to (finally) finish a successful project. Actually, very naturally the about the same people gathered together two more evenings, which points that the end of a successful project is very likely a start of a new one.