The ems-message – behind the scenes

It has been just over a year since the EMS Editorial Board morphed into the Liaison Committee and took on the challenge of improving communication with our Members and Associate Members.  You may or may not know that EMS has 30 Member Societies and 37 Associate Members – more information on these can be found at https://www.emetsoc.org/members-activities/.
The Liaison Committee is one of 5 EMS committees and project teams and we currently have 7 committee members: Hrvoje Bobinac (Croatia), Sinéad Duffy (Ireland), Emily Gleeson (Ireland), Martina Junge (EMS Secretary), Andrea Oestreich (EMS), Bob Riddaway (EMS President) and Laura Zubiate (Spain/Ireland).

To begin communicating more regularly with Member Societies, we firstly assigned responsibility for liaising with a few Member Societies to each member of the Liaison Committee and we feel that this has been quite effective. For example, Laura Zubiate from Spain interacts with the Spanish speaking Societies, Martina Junge and Andrea Oestreich interact with the German speaking Members and Hrvoje Bobanic from Croatia liaises with most of the Societies in southeast Europe.

Over the past year or so we have produced 8 editions of the ems-message containing in excess of 120 articles. These articles have been mainly written by members around Europe; at this stage most Societies have written at least one article for a newsletter edition.

It is inevitable that Societies go through periods of relative inactivity and thus may not have news items to report on. For this reason, we widened the scope of the material gathered for the ems-message to include any articles of a meteorological nature that would be of interest to a European audience and articles on updates and advancements on the science of meteorology. For example, we have included articles on data rescue, the state of the climate and one on a wave power plant in Spain.

From our point of view the interviews of the month – both with the Presidents and members of a Society – have provided useful, very interesting information about past and future activities of societies. We also hope that reading about the activities of Societies may inspire event planning by other societies. It is wonderful to see the large amount of work and collaborations being carried out by voluntary meteorological societies around Europe.

In recent editions we have received articles from ESSL, the European Severe Storms Laboratory, and Centro Epson Meteo – Meteo Operations Italia both Associate Member of EMS. We will continue to include more from our Associate Members in 2019.

Readership levels of the ems-message are still at quite a low level and we would really appreciate if EMS Member Society and Associate Member Boards could spread the word about our newsletter. We really enjoy putting each edition together and learn a lot of new interesting material each time.

So the next time you’re holding a lecture, workshop or event or presenting awards, perhaps you could ask one of your members or Board to write a short article and submit a few photos to us. We are delighted to receive all submissions so keep them coming!

By Emily Gleeson, EMS Liaison Committee