Communicating meteorology: the University Partnership for Atmospheric Sciences (UPAS)

The recently formed University Partnership for Atmospheric Sciences (UPAS) has been developed by student, academic staff and faculty representatives of the 10 German universities that provide consecutive studies in the field of meteorology through both Bachelor (BSc) and Master (MSc) programmes. UPAS is open to all meteorologists at all levels and is supported by an executive office hosted at the University Bonn. The explicit goal of UPAS is to secure, guide and further develop meteorology as a study and research field at German universities while also synergizing the efforts of the individual partners in the four areas of

• Attracting suitable students,
• Excellent education,
• Synergies for successful science, and
• Societal and Community outreach.

We will present our efforts of the past months, which included e.g. establishing an international network of early-career scientists in the field of meteorology through virtual monthly meet-ups as well as an annual early-career scientist conference, testing experiments focusing on climate change and developing a handbook for meteorologists to showcase these experiments in a classroom near them, and using tools on our website to interact with the general public. Our upcoming plans include strategically entering the world of online and social media to both communicate to and interact with meteorology students in addition to interested citizens regarding meteorology as a whole, as well as establishing a nation-wide citizen science project. We are also interested in forming international ties to networks with similar objectives.