I am honored to have seen page proofs of Gary Lackmann’s new book Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology: Dynamics, Analysis, and Forecasting to be published later this year by the American Meteorological Society. For this book, Gary goes back to the original meaning of the word synoptic (“forming a summary or synopsis”). Twelve chapters summarize and synthesize all scales of motion, from the planetary down to the microphysical, not just those on the synoptic scale.

This is the first new book on synoptic meteorology in 20 years, and its appearance is long overdue. Lackmann’s book updates previous textbooks with new concepts and synthesizes material that has not appeared in textbooks before. His last three chapters on numerical weather prediction, weather forecasting, and manual analysis contain some material that hasn’t been updated since Petterssen’s (1956) textbook.

What is best about this book is that it rises to the challenge offered by Rossby: to bridge the gap between theory and observations. No other book on synoptic meteorology had done this as throughly or as effectively. Lackmann skillfully weaves back and forth from QG, PV, and EnKF to cold fronts aloft, cold-air damming, and cold-air outbreaks.

I could quibble about some points, but I won’t. You’ll want this book. In terms of style and content, it is the perfect companion to Markowski and Richardson’s Mesoscale Meteorology in Midlatitudes. These two books form an ideal and unique set from which to build a solid undergraduate or graduate curriculum blending synoptic-scale and mesoscale dynamical meteorology and forecasting.

Not since the 1990s has a useful, intelligent synoptic meteorology book been written by an expert in the field. Lackmann fulfills a desperate need among today’s teachers and students.

[Disclaimer: Gary and I went to my very first Eric Clapton concert together (Tacoma 1988). Later, we ended up at SUNY Albany together, part of the early to mid 1990s milieu there. I consider him a close friend and one of the best synoptic meteorologists and teachers out there now.]

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 your scientific communication skills

Contact me eloquentscience at gmail for more information.

…at the time of my first reading of Eloquent science, I was rewriting a paper that had not, shall we say, passed gracefully through the peer-review process. Schultz’s book provided useful guidance that improved the paper at once. While there are plenty of books on communication skills for scientists, there is no doubt many students and professionals would benefit as I have from Schultz’s thorough how-to guide to becoming a better communicator of science.

Eloquent science is exceptional in its focus on the practical aspects of scientific communication in its most common forms…. The organization of the book is not unlike a shop manual. Need some hints on how to come up with an effective title? There is a chapter for that (and everyone who has considered a 30 word title ending in ‘‘part one’’ should read it).

Schultz provides one recommendation in this section I really like: oral presentations can be more engaging, provocative and controversial than might be acceptable in a journal format. As Kerry Emanuel writes in a sidebar: ‘‘I try to provoke my audience, mostly by going out on limbs that I would never do in writing a professional paper’’ (p. 262). If this approach is rather rare in reality, it is probably because it requires a certain passion and audacity that may not come naturally to most of us. But Schultz shows there is room to aspire to something more compelling.

…if you require a deeper reference covering a range of communication issues, then I recommend Schultz’s Eloquent science. This is an excellent book that deserves a place on the handiest shelf along with the best standard references. But beyond the workaday nuts-and-bolts guidance on how to write and speak effectively is an important message. It can be seen throughout in the active words Schultz uses to describe the attributes of good communication—connect, engage, provoke, entertain. He lays out the problem in the introduction: ‘‘The hunt for new knowledge excites us . . . But, when we speak or write, we fail to convey our enthusiasm and to personalize our science within a proper context. Purging our personalities from our work sterilizes it. We scientists individually need to find our voices, our creativity, and our originality’’ (p. xxvii). What he is saying is that a dispassionate analysis does not require a passionless presentation. I agree.

Download the review as a PDF here.

Polar Research 2011, 30, 7036, DOI: 10.3402/polar.v30i0.7036.

The issue with commas that Bob raised is referred to as the serial comma. The style of many American publishers is to use the serial comma, whereas the style of many British (and European) publishers is to omit it. Because Eloquent Science was published by the American Meteorological Society (which follows the Chicago Manual of Style), serial commas were included.

I’ve appeared in the University of Manchester Junk the Jargon Podcast (Junkcast). You can listen or read the transcript here.

In this Junkcast, I talk about how to engage an audience, giving some examples from my and others’ presentations.

I recently coauthored a paper that has now been accepted for publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Schultz, D. M., and G. Vaughan, 2011: Occluded fronts and the occlusion process: A fresh look at conventional wisdom. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 92, doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS3057.1.

This paper is the first one I’ve written solely on occluded fronts since I started my meteorological career on occluded fronts with my master’s thesis (published as Schultz and Mass 1993, Mon. Wea. Rev.). It’s a topic that I’ve read thoroughly and am passionate about it. Schultz and Vaughan (2011) summarizes some things I had been thinking about for several years, but had not articulated into a written framework. Geraint Vaughan’s contributions to helping me articulate myself were considerable, as well.

Writing the paper provided a set of challenges that were easier to handle because of the lessons that I learned in writing Eloquent Science. The challenges included:

• Conveying information at a level where you didn’t need to be an expert to understand.
  
• Fighting the desire to discuss the fine details that interest me, but may not interest most of the readers.
  
• Creating illustrations that are both scientifically accurate and easy to understand.
  
• Addressing published research that is counter to the arguments that I make.
  
• Convincing others to abandon what they’ve been taught in favor of this new paradigm that better explains the observations.
  
• Providing an explanation that authors can adopt in revised versions of their textbooks, especially for introductory-level meteorology courses.

One example of how proud I am of the article is that I was able to draw a nice analogy, as shown below.

It is undeniably true that in many cyclones the cold front approaches the warm front, eventually overtaking it. But, is catch-up the explanation for occluded-front formation, or is it the consequence of an underlying dynamical process?

Consider the following analogy. Suppose you had come across an automobile accident and asked a witness, “What happened here?” and got the obvious and unhelpful response, “Two cars collided.” An explanation would be if one car failed to brake or one car ran a red light. Information from the collision could then be used to assess which possible explanations are most likely (e.g., the damage patterns on the two cars can rule out some possible explanations). Simply put, catch-up to produce an occluded front is the result of the occlusion process in the Norwegian cyclone model; it does not provide an explanation for how the occlusion process occurs.

Another aspect of the paper that I am proud of is that nearly all the figures were drafted or redrafted by a professional graphic artist, Nick Sellers of CutGraphics. The figures showing the different airstreams of an extratropical cyclone were painstakingingly crafted to ensure that they are as scientifically accurate as is feasible.

More scientific papers ought to consider using graphics developed by professionals. Let’s face it, unless you have the artistry of Mel Shapiro, many of us scientists don’t have the artistic ability to draw professional-looking graphics. I only paid a few hundred pounds to get these figures done, which is a fraction of the page charges that I will pay to publish the article. Thus, I think this money was well worth it.

If you’ll be at the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in Seattle in January, please stop by one of the Eloquent Science events.

1. Sunday 23 January: Improving Your Writing Skills for Students and Scientists, at end of the AMS Student Conference.

2. 9:45-11:00 a.m., Tuesday 25 January: Book signing at the AMS Books Booth in the Exhibit Hall.

3. 1:30-3:00 p.m., Tuesday 25 January: Eloquent Professional Communication: Customer-Oriented Writing and High-Impact Presentations (Room 304 Washington State Convention Center)

4. 3:30-3:45 p.m., Tuesday 25 January: Eloquent Science: A course to improve scientific and communication skills 20th Symposium on Education (Room 604 Washington State Convention Center)

5. 8:45-9:45 a.m., Wednesday 26 January: Best resources for communication skills for scientists. 14th Conference of Atmospheric Science Librarians International (Room 304 Washington State Convention Center)

6. 1:30-1:45 p.m., Wednesday 26 January: How to Publish a Scientific Paper: Reflections on Being a Journal Editor. 14th Conference of Atmospheric Science Librarians International (Room 304 Washington State Convention Center)

7. 9:45-11:00 a.m., Thursday 27 January: Book signing at the AMS Books Booth in the Exhibit Hall.

And, if you want to see what I do in my day job—when I’m not promoting Eloquent Science, but being an Eloquent Scientist—stop by the Poster Session on Monday 24 January from 2:30-4:00 p.m. I’m in the 24th Conference on Weather and Forecasting/20th Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction session on Decision Support, Forecast Verification and Downscaling with “A new paradigm for occluded fronts and the occlusion process“, presenting a poster on my new paper with Geraint Vaughan.

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 Supplement.

The chapters are short – around ten pages each, on average – and self-contained. Therefore, readers
may dip into and out of particular chapters of interest, if they prefer not to read the whole book
sequentially.

One reason the book is such a delight to read is that it is peppered throughout with colourful and
entertaining quotes.

In summary, I highly recommend this book. The writing is clear (as you would expect for a book on
effective communication!) and the treatment is comprehensive. Few researchers in the atmospheric
sciences and intersecting disciplines would not benefit from the advice. I imagine that anyone who has
ever squinted their way through a long conference session would agree.

Dr Paul Williams
Royal Society Research Fellow
Department of Meteorology
University of Reading