PG chairs can communicate with conveners and authors of the sessions in their PG at all steps of session and programme organization, as well as during the General Assembly, through the PG mail tool. It is possible to contact:

• all conveners (including co-conveners) of all sessions or only conveners (including co-conveners) of selected sessions of your PG,
• all contact authors of all sessions of your PG,
• all authors (including contact and co-authors) of all sessions of your PG,
• all authors (including contact and co-authors) of ECS abstracts.

In order to contact authors of a specific session, it is necessary to log in to the session modification of the respective session.

Please ensure to use respectful and gender neutral language in all communications, and also encourage conveners to do so.

Also, note that the mail tool generates a no-reply email. If further contact is needed, it is necessary to clearly inform a relevant email address in the text of the message.

The EGU General Assembly session programme is organized into several programme groups and their respective sessions. The session programme is built in three steps following the timing in the deadlines & milestones table.

• Call-for-skeleton programme: the PG chairs are asked to implement sub-programme groups in their respective PG to guide session submission. The sub-programme groups can be adjusted during the later phase of session programme finalization.
• Public call-for-session proposals: the public is invited to suggest sessions. Information for future conveners and guidelines for the call-for-sessions can be found in the convener guidelines and rules.
• Session programme finalization: the PG chairs and their scientific officers are asked to compile their session programme from suggested sessions. They can solicit late sessions to fill possible thematic gaps in the programme.

Skeleton programme

The call-for-skeleton programme tool is available via the Copernicus Office dashboard for PC members called "PC Overview", and the corresponding links will be provided by email. In this phase, PG chairs are asked to define sub-programme groups.

Public call-for-sessions

Guidelines for session proposal can be found in the convener guidelines and rules. The session proposal form contains the following items:

• Session title and description: conveners are only able to change the title and description during the Call for Sessions and the Session Organization stages (tools SOI and SOII). If there is an urgent change in the session title or description beforehand, conveners must directly ask their PG chairs or their scientific officers to accept and implement the requested changes. This can be done in the list of sessions of the PC Overview.
• Conveners: conveners are entered by first name, last name, and email. If these data match an existing user ID, they are connected to this ID, else they are assigned a new ID. Please register (co-)conveners that already have an ID with the email address associated with that ID. This is to avoid multiple IDs for the same person and associated login problems. Conveners and participants can update their user account and change email address at https://administrator.copernicus.org/personal_data. The EGU strongly encourages conveners to build their teams and organize their sessions considering and promoting under-represented demographics, in particular including: (i) multiple countries and institutes, (ii) different career stages, with particular attention to the participation of Early Career Scientists, (iii) different genders and all other forms of diversity, and (iv) diverse scientific approaches. Sessions that fulfil the criteria on diversity defined by the EGU Equality, Diversion and Inclusion (EDI) Working Group will be able to display the EDI logo on the programme.
• Keywords: conveners are asked to select keywords. This selection can be adjusted during session programme finalization. The keywords are used to identify potential session similarity and the main target is inter-programme group overlap. Keywords are not used to characterize sessions for online search tools.
• Inter- and Transdisciplinary Sessions (ITS): sessions that are truly inter- and/or transdisciplinary can be suggested as an ITS programme.
• Cooperation between PGs: conveners can suggest other PGs for co-organization. The PG chair and officers need to follow up on these suggestions during session programme finalization.
• Session co-sponsoring: conveners can suggest co-sponsoring of their session by colleague scientific organizations. The co-sponsorship's status should be given as proposed or approved by the colleague organization. The PG chair and officers need to follow up on these suggestions during session programme finalization.

Session programme finalization

After the open call for session proposals, PG chairs and their scientific officers are asked to finalize their session programme. Please pay specific attention to the following points:

• Finalization: after the finalization of this tool, further changes can only be implemented by Copernicus Meetings. The recommendation is not to finalize until the autumn PC meeting.
• Permissions: science officers serving as sub-programme group chairs can only see and modify sessions and session proposals of their sub-programme group(s) and adjust the respective sequence. The entire list of sessions and session proposals of all sub-programme groups is only available for programme group chairs.
• Ordering of sessions: all sessions in the programme (i.e. your own and co-organized sessions) can be moved to any position in your programme, including the positioning into sub-programme groups. This is simply done by drag-and-drop.
• Session numbering: the session numbers will be assigned automatically upon finalization of the tool based on (a) the affiliation of sessions to sub-programme groups of their leading PG and (b) the sequence of sessions within their sub-programme groups. Thereby, the session number contains a running number within the sub-programme group of the leading PG (e.g. BG6.4) as well as ITS (e.g. ITS3.6/NH2.3), whereas PGs serving as co-organization partners will not be assigned a running number (e.g. CL7.8, co-organized by AS5).
• New sessions: the PG chair and officers can upload new session proposals to fill thematic gaps in the session programme that they build from the public session proposals.
• Session implementation: please carefully check convener diversity, session co-organization, and session co-sponsoring (more below).
• Conveners: as far as possible, please check that convener teams reflect (i) multiple countries and institutes, (ii) different career stages, and especially include early career scientists, and (iii) gender diversity. Sessions need at least two active conveners (1 convener and 1 co-convener) and can have maximum of 5 conveners (1 convener and 4 co-conveners). Our rule is a maximum of 3 (co-)convenerships in total per person, with one as lead convener. One additional (co-)convenership for US or GDB is allowed. Short courses are exempted from the rule on the number of (co-)convenerships. When assigning (co-)conveners to sessions, the tool might alert you once a person violates this rule.
• EDI – Equality, diversity, and inclusion: EGU's EDI working group introduced in 2020 a flag for sessions with convener teams fulfilling the 3 EDI criteria on gender, career stage, and origin. Therefore, when implementing sessions, these 3 criteria are checked by the database depending on the user profile of the respective (co-)convener. If a session fulfils all 3 criteria, the EDI logo will be shown at the session number in the session programme.
• Keywords: keywords selected by conveners can be adjusted. The keywords are used to identify potential session similarity and the main target is inter-programme group overlap. Keywords are not used to characterize sessions for online search tools. Typing in the keyword box will bring up suggestions from the EGU keyword list.
• Session similarity: if a significant number of keywords or part of the session title and description is similar for two or more sessions, these sessions are listed as potentially similar, with the option to contact the involved parties to agree on a merger. Please carefully check the section headlined "session similarity" to identify sessions with a potential overlap in topics. Session mergers are possible within and between programme groups. It is strongly encouraged to build sessions that are distinct and/or complementary. Taking the consistent feedback of participants into consideration, sessions should not be too similar. This has caused confusion in the past.
• Implementation of cooperation: if two or more PGs have a significant and active interest in the topics of a session, these PGs can co-organize this session. It is implied that conveners with a link to the different programme groups are involved in the session. Session co-organization is initiated in the session implementation form. The suggestions by conveners for co-organization are listed in the implementation form. The PG that is leading the session sends co-organization requests to other PGs. These proposals for co-organization can be accepted or rejected by the other PG. In the case of acceptance, the session is organized by all cooperation partners and placed in their programmes. The leading PG will take primary responsibility for scheduling the session. In terms of abstract statistics, the session is connected to the leading programme group. Union Symposia and Great Debates cannot be co-organized.
• Implementation of co-sponsoring by colleague organizations: the EGU encourages session endorsement by other colleague organizations as a means of strengthening ties and encouraging collaboration. Conveners can suggest co-sponsoring during session submission and these suggestions are shown in the session implementation form. The decision for session co-sponsoring lies with the PG chair. Please check the following: (i) session co-sponsoring is reciprocal, meaning that your PG will co-sponsor a similar session at a meeting of the colleague organization (the convener teams do not need to be identical), (ii) the session has conveners from both organizations, and (iii) the colleague organization agrees to session co-sponsoring. Session endorsement is intended for colleague scientific organizations and does not imply funding. An endorsing organization should furthermore not influence the work of the conveners or the content of the session.
• Inter- and Transdisciplinary Sessions (ITS): session proposals with a truly inter- and/or transdisciplinary scope might have been suggested to the ITS programme. In the session programme finalization form, ITS proposals are handled as follows: before the ITS committee can implement ITS proposals, they first must indicate whether they agree on the eligibility for an ITS session or not. In parallel, the proposed scientific leading PG chair must also indicate whether they agree on the eligibility or not. If both agree on the eligibility, the ITS proposal becomes truly an ITS proposal and can be implemented into the ITS session programme by the ITS committee. If both parties deny the eligibility of the proposal for ITS the session proposal is moved to the PG of the proposed scientific leader for further handling (implementation as an own session or rejection of the proposal). If the ITS committee and the proposed scientific leading PG disagree on the eligibility of the proposal, they must first sort this out before either party can proceed with the handling of the proposal.

Public call for abstracts

The call for abstracts for EGU23 opens on 1 November 2022 and has a deadline on 10 January 2023, 13:00 CET. Please assist your conveners during the call for abstracts by for example advertising the entire session programme in your programme group.

Conveners can solicit one presentation for their session. To this purpose, each session can generate one transaction number (TAN) in their session modification tool to provide to the author submitting the solicited presentation. Each programme group chair has in addition a limited number of extra TAN that they can assign to sessions to allow an additional solicited abstract.

This task concerns only the abstracts with financial support application tthat were submitted by 1 December 2022. Support ranking consists of the following steps:

• Convener rating: conveners rate support applications by the quality of the science and the quality of the abstract. They can also mark one abstract in their session as essential. Conveners are not allowed to rate on support applications on which they are involved as co-author. These applications are either handled by other session conveners or directly by the PG chair or teh PG Scientifc officers.
• Finalizing the convener tool support application assignment & rating: once the conveners' deadline has expired, you will be asked to finalize this tool for the sessions that are still open (i.e. conveners have not finished the rating). PG Chairs should only handle the session(s) on which their PG has the lead. At this step, you can also rate applications which conveners could not handle because they are co-authors on the abstract.
• PG chair ranking: the PG chair provides a ranking of all ratings within their PG. This ranking is passed to the support selection committee.

Support applications that did not receive a ranking will not be considered by the support selection committee.