The Conference on Meteorology, Climatology and Atmospheric Physics (COMECAP) has been co-organized by the Hellenic Meteorological Society on a biennial basis since 1992. After about 20 years, this years’ 15th COMECAP returns to Ioannina and is co-organized by the Laboratory of Meteorology and Climatology of the University of Ioannina, the Hellenic Meteorological Society and the Mariolopoulos-Kanaginis Foundation for Environmental Sciences. The unusual circumstances brought by the Covid-19 pandemic have led to its delay by a year, but also carved a new hybrid format for the first time in its 30 year history. In meteorological terms, “every cloud has a silver lining”, which means that we had to innovate to partially compensate for the loss of some of the in-person interactions and the carefree mask-less times. With the invaluable help and know-how of Conferre, around 100 online and 125 onsite participants will interact through a novel online platform available on any device and share their research results and breakthrough ideas, either through onsite and online talks or through e-posters that are projected on onsite screens substituting for the poster boards, or on any device. Around 40% of these participants are graduate students presenting the results of their MSc or Phd theses, illustrating that COMECAP continues to instigate the interest about atmospheric sciences to young researchers. In this years’ conference, a total of 285 abstracts were submitted in two rounds due to the delay of the conference and resulted in 211 submitted full papers that underwent a thorough review process and are published in the eproceedings that you hold in your hand. The papers and presentations cover a wide range of topics on Meteorology, Climatology, Climate dynamics, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, as well as Air Quality and Environmental Physics. They are organized in seven chapters and are published in alphabetic order with regards to the last name of the first author. We would like to thank the Scientific Committee for its valuable efforts during the review process, the Organizing Committee for its tireless efforts towards the success of this conference and Conferre, the Congress Secretariat and specifically Lina Siamopoulou and Korina Hatzigianni for all of their hard work and perseverance during these rocky times. We would also like to acknowledge our sponsors for their support that brought this conference into fruition.

We wish you all a pleasant stay in Ioannina and a stimulating time at COMECAP 2021.

For more information see the following pdf: