Jargon can be used for several purposes.

• To obscure the real physical processes involved in the weather scenario, possibly because the processes are not known or not quantifiable, but also because the authors are intending to obfuscate their lack of knowledge through the use of the jargon.
• To name some process or feature that hasn’t been described before. Such jargon may be a useful tool to convey a complicated concept with a simple phrase (e.g., cold front), or it may be a way for a selfish author to canonize his or her name in posterity.
• To invoke a colorful term to describe a well-known process. Usually, this is simply to show off.
• To indicate membership in a select group, possibly to exclude others.

Examples of map-room jargon include:

“Strong upper-level dynamics were responsible for the rapidly developing surface cyclone.”: The problem here is the word dynamics (you’ll also see the words support and energy appearing in this context, as well). What does it mean? Strong upper-level vorticity advection? If so, say that. Be more precise in your language.

“The low-level jet played a primary role in the resulting convection.”: Many problems exist with this sentence. First, what does it mean for some object to play “a primary role” in a process (convection) that requires three ingredients to occur (lift, instability, and moisture)? Is the author saying that one is more important than the other? Second, is it even possible to quantify this statement? What is the relative importance of the low-level jet to the convection? If the jet were 5 m/s weaker, would the convection not occur? Third, the exact role the low-level jet played is unstated. Was it the supply of moisture that was important? Was it the low-level wind shear that was important? So, I hope you see that avoiding such words as “role”, “forcing”, “activity”, and others listed in Table 10.4 of Eloquent Science hinder precise scientific communication.

Please, take the pledge with me. Eliminate map-room jargon from your scientific writing, email chat groups, and map-room discussions. If you see someone else using map-room jargon, encourage them to use more physically based thinking and language. By cleaning up our language, we respect the physical processes acting in the atmosphere, we force ourselves to understand the atmosphere better, and we demand higher expectations of ourselves and our colleagues.

Communicating as a Scientist

Writing Scientific Papers

Writing Correspondence

Giving Oral Presentations

Interacting during Conference Sessions

Communicating in the Classroom

After each section, there is a quiz and a set of learning activities to get you thinking and applying the lessons in real practice. Clever!

By designing an interesting, interactive poster and selling it to the audience, look at the people I was able to attract to my poster.

(Photo by the AMS official photographer)

Instead of throwing together a bunch of graphics and making a boring poster, I wanted to do something different to distinguish my work from the other posters. I wanted to build up some hype, and I wanted to engage people in discussion. I wanted to give people something to take with them to remind them of the poster and to give them a place to get more information about my research.

So, I designed the poster to engage people’s thinking. It was a test with six questions. The questions appeared on the poster and were also distributed as a bright yellow handout to visitors. You can see the handouts in an envelope on the posterboard and on the table.

You could get the answers from two places. One was on the back of the handout. The other was on the poster, where people had to flip up the flaps to see the answers to the questions.

Large balloons at the poster attracted people to the poster, even if just to see what the balloons were for.

By the time the poster session was over, it was one of the most engaging scientific activities I had ever done. Given that the average attendance at any given session was less than 100 people (and usually 30-50 people), I received more substantive feedback from people during the poster than the one or two polite questions I would have received had I given an oral presentation. I gave out nearly all my handouts, which meant that I directly interacted with at least as many as would have likely sat passively through an oral presentation. Plus, they got a handout to take home and remind them of my poster.

Getting rejected from an oral presentation in favor of a poster was one of the best things that happened to me! I want to thank the WAF/NWP conference organizers for that opportunity.

In the future, I will be more enthusiastic about presenting a poster than giving an oral presentation. In fact, I will probably ask for a poster instead.

To see the research upon which this poster is based, download the manuscript from the AMS Web site.

Schultz, D. M., and G. Vaughan, 2011: Occluded fronts and the occlusion process: A fresh look at conventional wisdom. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., in press

UPDATE: See some of the people that stopped by the poster.

Some examples are the following.

Data. “Data” is always plural. “Datum” is the singular form, but I think saying “data point” sounds better.

Dynamics. This term is often used to describe physical processes vaguely
without actually stating what those processes are. Replace such expressions
with a more physical description.

DRAFT: The strong dynamics of the rapidly developing extratropical cyclone . . .

IMPROVED: A strong short-wave trough in the jet stream was responsible for
the rapid development of the extratropical cyclone.

t test. Formally known as Student’s t test, not “the student t test.” Student was the penname of author William Sealy Gosset, who published the test in 1908 (Student 1908).

What are your most annoying pet peeves in atmospheric science?

Submit them as comments below, or email me: eloquentscience at gmail.com.

The best ones will receive an Eloquent Science mug for your home or office.

“As a scientist, you get lots of rejections, but not a lot of supportive comments.”

I had had similar thoughts before, but never articulated them in the succinct way that Prof. Gleeson did. My idea was that we rarely receive any feedback on anything we do as scientists, even negative feedback.

When was the last time you got an email from someone who read your recently published article and had a question about it? Or, they just wanted to drop a note to say how much they enjoyed reading it?

When was the last time a colleague sent you a link to a recently published paper that you might have missed on a topic that you may be working on?

I wouldn’t change being a scientist for anything. I love my job. But, I worry that by not interacting with others, supporting our friends with positive assurance, and challenging our colleagues to be better, we deprive ourselves of the human experience. Even a note to someone you never met before saying how much you enjoyed reading their latest article can be a start to developing a new friendship, or even a coauthor.

Interestingly, several students over my career have told me that they were avoiding a career as a research scientist because they didn’t want to sit in an office and not interact with people. I can probably speak for many of us at this stage in our careers where we wish we had more time to sit and work peacefully alone in our offices for even just an afternoon!

Interaction is a big part of what we do as we advance in our careers. I think the (sometimes) isolating experience that we see (or imagine) grad students to have can be a big factor in this perception.

So, I recommend that everyone reading this, at some point over the next few weeks, send just one email, make one phone call, say just one nice thing to one of your colleagues. Be a supportive and encouraging person…for the betterment of our field.

Did you know that air mass is two words when used as a noun, but one word when used as an adjective (e.g., airmass modification)?

If you are ever wondering how scientific words are spelled or used, the American Meteorological Society has two resources for you.

The Glossary of Meteorology (2000). Search for the word in question to make sure that you are using the word correctly and spelling it properly (at least as defined by this resource).

The AMS Authors’ Guide, available from the Authors’ Resource Center. A thorough document for how to format your manuscript for publication in an AMS journal. What you may not know is that there is a section on correct spelling of words near the end.

Correct use and spelling of scientific terminology in your manuscript will give the reviewers one less thing to complain about!

1. False alarm ratio and probability of detection are both quantities that can have values between 0 and 1, but the x axis ranges from 0 to the unrealistic value of 1.2.

2. Making both axes range from 0 to 1 would have made a lot of sense.

3.The graph should be square so that distances along the x and y axes represent equivalent intervals.

4. Why are there horizontal grid lines drawn, but not vertical grid lines? In any case, the horizontal grid lines should be eliminated as they do not contribute anything to the graph.

This figure illustrates just some of the problems with using Microsoft Excel to create publication-quality graphs. Here is a peer-reviewed article (Su 2008) on the subject. If you are going to use Excel, at least go beyond its default values and use commonsense to construct your graphs properly and professionally for scientific publications.

REFERENCE

Yu-Sung Su, It’s easy to produce chartjunk using Microsoft(R)Excel 2007 but hard to make good graphs, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Volume 52, Issue 10, 15 June 2008, Pages 4594-4601, ISSN 0167-9473, DOI: 10.1016/j.csda.2008.03.007.

The tick marks [on an axis of a graph] are pure numbers. Labels with a solidus such as R/µm are orthodox notation for what the numbers represent. Labels such as R (µm) are understood by us not to be consistent with standard mathematical notation, R is not multiplying µm. Rather, (µm) is a parenthetical remark, shadowing our informality when we say ‘is in microns’.

Fiedler, B. H., 2010: How do we really compute with units? Phys. Educ., 45(2), 167–172.

Thanks to Evgeni Fedorovich for pointing out this article to me.

As the Web page says about Arial replacing Helvetica, “To an experienced designer, it was like asking for Jimmy Stewart and getting Rich Little.”

I have to admit that I can now spot the difference between Helvetica and Arial, and for some strange reason, Helvetica just seems to look good from a distance.

(Image from Wikimedia)