Welcome a new Editor-Herschel Mitchell

To accommodate the growing number of manuscripts on data assimilation, we have added a new editor, Herschel Mitchell of Environment Canada. Herschel will be handling manuscripts on the topics of data assimilation, Kalman filtering, ensemble data assimilation, the ensemble Kalman filter, and operational global and regional NWP.

Welcome aboard Hersch!

Dave

The Unacceptable Practice of Shopping Manuscripts Around

Lately, I have seen situations at MWR and other journals where a manuscript was rejected, only to be resubmitted to the same journal or a different journal with only minor changes, if any, being made. In the cases I am familiar with, the reviews recommending rejection contained reasonable requests, including rerunning model simulations, fixing improper English language, and replotting figures.

Let me be perfectly clear.

Submitting your manuscript to the journal is a privilege, not a right. It is a privilege that can be revoked by the editor or publisher of the journal.

You are imposing upon an editor and several reviewers, all volunteers, to improve your manuscript for publication. Even the most critical reviews offer advice that can make your manuscript better. To ignore their efforts and resubmit the manuscript with only minor changes is a blatant disregard for the time of others. Most editors do not tolerate such behavior, and your manuscript will be rejected.

A similar infraction occurs when authors are found to be “shopping around” rejected manuscripts between journals. Because atmospheric science is a relatively small discipline (compared to physics or chemistry, for example) and your area of specialty may be even smaller still, chances are that some of the same people that knew about your original manuscript at the first journal will see it again at the next one. Not making major revisions to a rejected manuscript, whether or not it was submitted to the same journal, is simply unacceptable.

(Thanks to Andrea and Russ Schumacher for identifying an error in this post, now fixed.)

December 2008 issue of MWR

As the AMS processes the backlog of manuscripts, speeding up the time to publication (now about 200 days from the time of acceptance, down from 240 days last year), you'll notice the issues of MWR getting thicker. The December 2008 issue probably sets the record for length of a single issue among AMS journals: 727 pages.

NOAA OAR Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards

NOAA OAR awards their yearly Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards. This year, two papers were published in MWR, and another was won by one of our Editors and one of our future Associate Editors.

From Richard Spinrad's email:

The Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards were established to recognize the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Federal employees, and Cooperative Institute (CI) scientists associated with OAR who published outstanding scientific peer-reviewed research papers, review papers, books, monographs, and chapters of books that have contributed to or contain the results of research sponsored by OAR.

I would like to congratulate the following winners of the 2008 OAR Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards:

GFDL
Shaoqing Zhang, Matthew J. Harrison, Anthony Rosati, and Andrew Wittenberg. System design and evaluation of coupled ensemble data assimilation for global oceanic climate studies Monthly Weather Review, 135(12: 2007), 3541-3564.

ESRL – PSD
Thomas M. Hamill, Jeffrey S. Whitaker, and Steven L. Mullen. REFORECASTS: An Important Dataset for Improving Weather Predictions. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 87(1: 33-46) doi:10.1175/BAMS-87-1-33

ESRL – GSD
Tracy Lorraine Smith, Stanley G. Benjamin, Seth I. Gutman, and Susan Sahm. Short-range forecast impact from assimilation of GPS-IPW observations into the Rapid Update Cycle. Monthly Weather Review 135(2007), 2914-2930, doi: 10.1175/MWR3436.1

(Image from treehugger.com)

Highlights in the September issue of MWR

There are lots of papers on tropical meteorology in this month's issue.

Papers of note:

Sasaki’s Pivotal Contribution: Calculus of Variations Applied to Weather Map Analysis--John Lewis and S. Lakshmivarahan

The Impact of Analysis Error on Medium-Range Weather Forecasts--Kyle L. Swanson and Paul J. Roebber

Synoptic Control of Mesoscale Precipitating Systems in the Pacific Northwest--Paul J. Roebber, Kyle L. Swanson, and Jugal K. Ghorai

Vortex Lines within Low-Level Mesocyclones Obtained from Pseudo-Dual-Doppler Radar Observations--Paul Markowski, Erik Rasmussen, Jerry Straka, Robert Davies-Jones, Yvette Richardson, and Robert J. Trapp

Climatology of High Wind Events in the Owens Valley, California--Shiyuan Zhong, Ju Li, C. David Whiteman, Xindi Bian, and Wenqing Yao

Outgoing and Incoming MWR Editors

At the end of 2008, we will retire two editors from Monthly Weather Review. I am very sad to see Jim Doyle and Nolan Atkins go. Both have been remarkable editors during their years of service. Nolan has served for three years, and Jim has served for five years.

In return, MWR will get two new editors.

Todd Ringler is a great match for the increasing numbers of papers on climate models and weather that we get at MWR. In addition, he has expertise in numerical methods for numerical weather and climate prediction models. He works for the Climate, Ocean, and Sea Ice Modeling Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His web page is http://public.lanl.gov/ringler/ringler.html.

To accommodate the growing number of tropical and large-scale circulation submissions, I am pleased to announce that Matt Wheeler will be joining us. Matt is from the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, a partnership between the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO in Melbourne. To learn more about Matt and his scientific expertise, his web page is http://www.bom.gov.au/bmrc/clfor/cfstaff/matw.htm.

Please welcome these new editors to our editorial board.

Journals online are leading to more recent and fewer citations

When The Economist is covering a story about science publishing, you know it has got to be interesting!

James Evans published an article in Science that studied 34 million articles published in journals that made their archives available online. He found that "as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles."

My observation is consistent with Evans's results that more and more authors are forgetting where we came from, not citing older literature, and limiting the number of research citations. Also, more specialized fields, like data assimilation and ensembles, don't have as rich a history (despite recent historical reviews in MWR by John Lewis on the scientific origins of these fields).

Evans's article reminds us all that part of being a scientist is conducting the scholarship of where our science came from. Being aware of and reading articles, not only the most recent ones, but the historical ones, as well. Without those shoulders to stand upon, we risk not seeing farther.

REFERENCES:

Evans, J. E., 2008: Electronic publication and the narrowing of science and scholarship. Science, 321, 395, DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473.

Lewis, J.M., 2005: Roots of Ensemble Forecasting. Mon. Wea. Rev., 133, 1865–1885.

Lewis J, Lakshmivarahan S (2008) Sasaki's Pivotal Contribution: Calculus of Variations Applied to Weather Map Analysis. Monthly Weather Review: In Press

(Thanks to Roger Edwards and Steve Weiss for alerting me to this article.)

(Photo from Jupiter Images, as appearing in The Economist)