AGU Annual Meeting 2026

How it compares

The closest peer is the EGU General Assembly in Vienna each spring, which drew 22,497 participants this year and a heavier share of European institutes. Companies whose customers sit mainly in European research centers get more from Vienna; those who need US universities, federal agencies and national labs get more from AGU, and many instrument makers do both.

GSA Connects is a much smaller fall meeting, with 4,215 attendees in 2025, focused on geology. It suits suppliers of field and laboratory gear for geology departments, where AGU's breadth would mean many conversations outside the target.

For weather and climate, the AMS Annual Meeting in January reaches operational forecasters and private weather companies that AGU only partly covers. IMAGE, run with SEG and AAPG, is the applied geoscience and energy meeting with an industry-heavy floor; AGU is the research-led alternative. Ocean instrument and vessel suppliers often add the AGU co-sponsored Ocean Sciences Meeting, held every two years in late winter.

The AGU Annual Meeting is the trip for any company selling instruments, data, software or publishing services to Earth and space scientists, because it is the one week that puts that whole research community in a single hall.

Who exhibits

The floor mixes scientific instrument makers such as Campbell Scientific, Picarro, Nanometrics, Kongsberg Discovery and Thermo Fisher Scientific with software and data companies including Esri, MathWorks and Planet. Publishers such as Wiley, Springer Nature and Cambridge University Press take large stands. A big share of booths belong to NASA, NOAA, the national laboratories and dozens of universities recruiting graduate students, so visitors can meet funders, data providers and future collaborators as well as vendors.

This year's list is on its way. A HallBrief brief picks the exhibitors worth meeting for your goals and the people to talk to at each. Get a brief

AGU Annual Meeting 2026

AGU26 brings the meeting back to Moscone Center after New Orleans hosted it last year, using the North, South and West buildings. The conference runs five days and the exhibit hall four, closing at midday Thursday.

New this year are an Innovation Stage on the exhibit floor, where exhibitors give 45-minute presentations Monday to Wednesday, and guided Show Floor Tours that stop at participating booths. After San Francisco the meeting moves to Washington, D.C. next year and San Diego the year after.

• Plan vendor conversations for Monday to Wednesday: the exhibit hall closes at midday Thursday while sessions continue through Friday.
• NASA, NOAA, the Department of Energy laboratories and NSF facilities staff their own booths, which makes the hall the easiest place to reach program managers and data teams without an appointment.
• Check the Innovation Stage schedule in the AGU meeting app; the 45-minute slots are where instrument and software companies show new products, and they run only through Wednesday.
• The Academic Showcase area gathers university departments; students looking for graduate programs or postdocs can cover most of them in one pass.

Exhibiting

A standard 10x10 booth comes with drape, a sign, one full conference registration and three booth staff badges; universities can take furnished booths in the Academic Showcase. AGU keeps attendee contact lists private, so leads come from the booth itself, the Show Floor Tours and the Innovation Stage, which include follow-up lists. Cancellations earn a partial refund only until late August. The meeting pays off for companies whose buyers are research scientists and lab managers with grant budgets, and for agencies and universities recruiting talent.