Travel Grant: Enabling Students and Early-Career Scientists to Attend the Eleventh (11th) International GEOS-Chem Meeting (IGC11); Saint Louis, Missouri; June 11-14, 2024

This project will support the attendance of students and early-career scientists at the 11th International GEOS-Chem Meeting (IGC11). GEOS-Chem is an open-source global 3-D model of atmospheric composition used by hundreds of research groups around the world, including over 50 research groups in US universities. The meeting will inform and stimulate fundamental research in modeling of atmospheric composition with links to climate dynamics, biogeochemistry, and air quality. International GEOS-Chem meetings typically have been held every two years and are major events for the global atmospheric chemistry modeling community, with about 250 participants and a broad range of topics. Modeling of atmospheric chemistry is a grand scientific and computational challenge because of the need to simulate hundreds of gaseous and aerosol chemical species stiffly coupled to each other and interacting with transport on all scales. GEOS-Chem was incorporated recently (with support from NSF) as a chemical module in the Community Earth System Model (CESM), a fully coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future climate states. The 11th International GEOS-Chem Meeting (IGC11) will be held on June 11-14, 2024, at Washington University in St. Louis. The funds requested by this proposal will be specifically used to provide partial travel support for PhD students, postdocs, and other early-career scientists. Travel funds will be disbursed as individual allocations on the basis of demand, merit, the nature of travel, and the promotion of diversity. The meeting is especially valuable for graduate students and postdocs contemplating academic careers because of the large participation from US university groups and the collegiality of the GEOS-Chem community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.