Potential Temperature: Warm and Cold?

Does it make sense to talk about air with high values of potential temperature or equivalent potential temperature as warm or cold? I don’t think so, so I recommend talking about “air with higher or lower potential temperature” instead. Although it is wordier than warm or cold, the meaning is precise.

Eloquent Science 4-GB flashdrives

I have these nifty Eloquent Science 4-GB flashdrives for sale. They cost £10/€15/$15 if you see me in person, or add £3/€5/$6 for postage. The drive comes preloaded with lots of great resources: • Excerpts and outtakes from Eloquent Science • 21 direct links to online resources • 61 articles specifically designed to help develop … read more

Thermodynamic diagrams for free

Upon packing up my house in Oklahoma, I discovered a small stash of Skew T–logp thermodynamic diagrams that I had saved when Charlie Crisp cleaned out his office at NSSL. (I also have a huge stash of blank U.S. surface maps, in case anyone is interested in them.) Geraint Vaughan at Manchester had been lamenting … read more

How science progresses (a cynical viewpoint)

This is one of the most hilarious movies I’ve seen about how science works (or doesn’t work, as the case may be). Although it is a discussion between two physicists, you can imagine your favorite subdisciplines in your own field interacting this way.

Are students prepared for university-level writing?

Kim Brooks has this essay “Death to High School English” published in Salon.com. She details her experiences with finding students who don’t know the basics of writing: composition, structure, thesis statements, grammar, punctuation, and plagiarism. My own experiences here in the UK with final-year environmental-science majors were remarkably similar to hers, so the problem isn’t … read more

The Increasing Number of Open-Access Publishers: A Good Thing?

As a specialist in your field of research, we are pleased to invite you to contribute to our forthcoming Open Access book, XXXXXX. The book will be published by XXXXXX, Open Access publisher of books and journals in the fields of science, technology and medicine. XXXXX is a pioneer in the publication of Open Access … read more

The most prestigious journal in the world

Caleb Emmons, Professor of Mathematics at Pacific University, is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Universal Rejection. The Web site of the journal promotes the advantages of the journal. You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that … read more

Giving proper credit to Monin and Obukhov

Often in the literature, you will hear about the Monin-Obukhov length (30,400 results in google today) and Monin-Obukhov similarity theory (9520 results in google today). Monin-Obukhov similarity theory is the correct term. But, the length L should only be referred to as the Obkhov Obukhov length, as correctly stated in the AMS Glossary and on … read more

Upsidence?

Dave Mechem (University of Kansas) and my Manchester colleagues have been telling me about a new term that has been adopted from geology into atmospheric science: upsidence. My understanding of upsidence is that the term means ascent in an environment with otherwise large-scale descent. The term is used to refer to an “upsidence wave”, a … read more

Teaching Scientific Communication Skills – BAMS article

My experiences teaching a scientific communications laboratory course based on Eloquent Science is described in a recent article published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Schultz, D. M., 2010: A university laboratory course to improve scientific communication skills. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 91, 1259–1266, ES25–34. Download the article here, along with its Electronic … read more

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