Cold Front or Cold Surge? (Schultz et al. 1998, Fig. 12d)

Schultz, D. M., W. E. Bracken, L. F. Bosart, G. J. Hakim, M. A. Bedrick, M. J. Dickinson, and K. R. Tyle, 1997: The 1993 Superstorm cold surge: Frontal structure, gap flow, and tropical impact. Mon. Wea. Rev., 125, 5-39; Corrigenda, 125, 662.

I don’t remember why I chose that term. In hindsight, I wished I didn’t use it. What we were looking at was simply a cold front. I’m not sure what “surging” is. Is that a dynamical term? Was it meant to imply something about the motion of the cold front?

In the paper, we have a footnote that I guess describes what I was thinking at the time: “As discussed by Davis (1995, p. 1762), the term front suggests a long-lived feature characterized by primarily balanced dynamics, whereas surge indicates a transient, largely unbalanced feature. It is beyond the purpose of this paper to definitively address the degree of balance in this case owing to, in part, the sparseness of the data. Therefore, we will refer to Central American cold surges without the implications of the degree of balance.”

If we didn’t discuss the degree of balance, why not stick to the simpler and more descriptive term cold front? The term would be a more appropriate web search term for those trying to find out information about cold fronts, which is what this feature was.

Like I said, I wish I had just stuck to the term cold front.

In many cases, the author includes the figures in their manuscripts after the text accompanied by the figure captions for the convenience of the reviewers. To most accurately represent how these figures will look in the journal, the author should present these figures either in single-column format or double-column format (depending on the journal, of course).

For single-column figures in American Meteorological Society journals, their width is 7.9 cm. For a double-column figure, the width is 16.5 cm.

These are the dimensions that the figures will appear in the journal, so your submission should be consistent with this size to ensure that the reviewers can determined whether your figures are readable for the audience.

Of course, this approach is not much different from how many scientists create their posters. Faced with deadlines and the perceived lesser importance of posters, most scientists simply do not think much about their posters. Perhaps they are pissed off that they didn’t get a talk or they feel that fewer people may see their poster than witness an oral presentation.

I’ve argued elsewhere that this approach will accomplish the goal of making a poster, but will not necessarily accomplish the real goal, which is to sell your research ideas to other people.

Science could benefit from a little bit of marketing, in the same way that commercial products are marketed. I’m not arguing for a slick, manipulative advertising campaign that distorts the facts, but let’s start with the basics.

Posters should be visual. Few people will want to engage reading large amounts of text, especially in the loud, socializing, and distracting environment of a conference poster session. Focus on high-quality graphics that are annotated to communicate your point.

Posters should be aesthetically pleasing. Don’t cram text and figures onto the poster. Leave large regions of open space. Choose pleasing color combinations. Make the little bit of text on the poster easy to read.

Posters should communicate one main point. The viewer should walk away from the poster having learned one thing. Therefore, limit content on your poster that does not support your one main point.

Not following these tips runs the risk of having your poster look like every other poster in the long rows of posterboards and being ignored.

Here are some other resources where you may find good information on posters and their construction.

postersession.com: Nice collection of basic poster templates to get you started (also various printing and shipping options). They also have a great blog with poster tips.

Colin Purrington’s Designing Conference Posters: One of the most thorough resources on the internet on poster construction.

ISI Impact Factor Versus Scopus SJC Factor (Courtesy of Rene Garreaud) Click on figure to enlarge.

Thanks to Prof. Rene Garreaud of the Departamento de Geofisica, Universidad de Chile, for sending me this graphic showing the comparison between the Impact Factor of ISI Web of Knowledge and the SJC Factor of SCOPUS, for journals in atmospheric sciences. These scores are commonly used to assess the “prestige” or “quality” of scientific journals. Although the two quantities are calculated differently, Rene’s graph shows that there is decent correlation between the two quantities. Not all journals have both of these scores calculated, though.

In fact, there is another journal ranking system by Google Scholar. Here is the link for atmospheric sciences.

Monthly Weather Review, the journal I serve as Chief Editor for, is much higher on Google Scholar’s rankings (6th) than ISI rankings (18th, the last time I looked at their proprietary rankings, so are only available to subscribers). I’m not impressed by the ISI ranking showing International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control very high on the list—my reading of that journal is that it is primarily an engineering journal, not an atmospheric science journal.

As far as “relevance” or “impact” goes, I never really care too much about these numbers. As I often say to people, the most relevant journal is the one that gets your article in the hands of the most people who will want to read it. By that measure, if I were to publish my latest research in some high impact factor journals, there would be little guarantee that any of my colleagues would read it. Synoptic meteorologists simply don’t read or publish in many of those journals. So, my ideas would not get the widest possible dispersal to the most relevant audience.

So, do I want to publish in a high impact factor journal, or do I want people to read my work?

After thinking a bit more about why certain papers on my CV have received as much or as little attention through citation, I decided it was time to take action. Therefore, I now present an annotated bibliography of Dave’s Least Cited — But Should Be More Cited — Papers.

The rules to make my list here are that the articles should have fewer than fifteen ISI citations and were published at least five years ago.

1. Schultz, D. M., C. C. Weiss, and P. M. Hoffman, 2006: The synoptic regulation of dryline intensity. Mon. Wea. Rev., 135, 1699-1709.

Thanks to Roger Wakimoto for three of the five citations that this undervalued paper has. It was also nicely featured in the Markowski and Richardson (2010) book.

As far as I am aware, this is the first paper to study what the synoptic-scale processes are that create strong drylines. We showed that the strongest drylines were associated with extratropical cyclones over eastern New Mexico, which provided a favorable deformation pattern to tighten the dewpoint-temperature gradient and produce a dryline. No dryline was present when an upper-level ridge was over the region.

This paper ought to be more highly cited because of the emphasis on the dryline as a focus for convective storms, which is a common theme in many published papers. This paper provides the synoptic context for understanding whether the dryline will be strong, weak, or absent. Therefore, it should be cited more than it is.

2. Schultz, D. M., and F. Zhang, 2007: Baroclinic development within zonally varying flows. Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc., 133, 1101-1112.

Two of the five citations were my own. Come on people. This paper is better than that! If you liked the article that came from my PhD thesis (Schultz et al. 1998, Mon. Wea. Rev.), where I showed that Norwegian cyclones were favored in diffluent background flow and Shapiro-Keyser cyclones were favored in confluent background flow, then this article is the natural follow-up and ought to be cited, too.

In Schultz and Zhang (2007), Fuqing Zhang took the standard idealized baroclinic channel model and added large-scale confluence or diffluence to demonstrate that the results using a barotropic model from my Schultz et al. (1998) do not change when going to a primitive-equation model. Also, this paper was able to link the surface frontal evolution (as described above) to the paradigm for upper-level frontogenesis in northwesterly and southwesterly flow that we discussed in Schultz and Doswell (1999, Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc.) and Schultz and Sanders (2002, Mon. Wea. Rev.).

The synthesis of these two conceptual models for surface frontogenesis and upper-level frontogenesis makes this one of my favorite papers that I’ve written, yet few others seem to have recognized its significance.

3. Verbout, S. M., D. M. Schultz, L. M. Leslie, H. E. Brooks, D. Karoly, and K. Elmore, 2007: Landfalling hurricanes in the North Atlantic basin with and without tornado outbreaks. Meteor. Atmos. Phys., 97, 255-271.

This is another paper published in 2007 that only received five citations. Hmmm, what was it about the papers that I published that year?

My contribution to this work was to demonstrate that tornado outbreaks associated with hurricanes along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico were associated with recurving hurricanes. The recurving was associated with the presence of an upper-level short-wave trough.

Given the recent emphasis on tropical storms, I am disappointed this paper is not more widely recognized. Perhaps it was because we published it in Meteor. Atmos. Phys., which is less well-read by American researchers? (Long story: This paper was originally submitted to an AMS journal, but we had problems with the Editor, so we published it elsewhere.)

4. Schultz, D. M., D. S. Arndt, D. J. Stensrud, and J. W. Hanna, 2004: Snowbands during the cold-air outbreak of 23 January 2003. Mon. Wea. Rev., 132, 827-842.

The likely reason this paper has only been cited 10 times is my own fault. The title lacks any description of what makes this study novel and worth reading. If I were to do it again, then I would retitle it something like “How the seeder-feeder effect can enhance snowfall production in horizontal convective roll clouds”.

This paper was the first documented evidence of how an upper-level cloud likely produced ice crystals that fell into shallow boundary-layer circulations that were generating horizontal convective rolls with clouds on the top. Light snow resulted, which normally would not fall from horizontal convective roll clouds.

Thus, this paper has the potential to be cited by anyone who is studying horizontal convective rolls. In reality, few cite it. This example is a nice lesson in the importance of choosing an appropriate and descriptive title for your paper.

5. Trapp, R. J., D. M. Schultz, A. V. Ryzhkov, and R. L. Holle, 2001: Multiscale structure and evolution of an Oklahoma winter precipitation event. Mon. Wea. Rev., 129, 486-501.

In this article (cited only 11 times), we show the complexity of what is going on from dual-Doppler analysis and dual-polarimetric analysis of a winter storm over Oklahoma. My role was to perform the synoptic and mesoscale analysis to put this storm into context. In there, we were able to show that the convective available potential energy (CAPE) was elevated above the frontal zone. This elevated instability, released by the frontogenesis associated with the frontal zone, allowed the production of a band of snowfall exceeding 10 inches (25 cm) across northern Oklahoma. Also, we showed that where the radar reflectivity was highest was not necessarily where the most precipitation fell.

6. Horgan, K. L., D. M. Schultz, R. H. Johns, J. E. Hales, and S. F. Corfidi, 2007: A five-year climatology of elevated severe convective storms in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. Wea. Forecasting, 22, 1031-1044.

Another 2007 paper, and cited only 11 times. And, it is another paper on elevated convection. Given the recent research and operational emphasis on elevated convection (such as with the PECAN field program — Plains Elevated Convection At Night), this paper should be more widely recognized than it is. At its time (and possibly still is), it was the most thorough climatology of elevated severe convective storms in the U.S.

So, there you go. I need your help in getting the attention these papers deserve. Let’s start citing these papers and make this father proud of his underachieving children!

(Image from wastedtalent.com.ar)

If only more speakers would follow this advice:

The average conference paper is 20 minutes in length. It is not a college lecture where students are to absorb the minutest detail of a subject planned and presented as part of a 10 to 16 week curriculum. Rather, a conference paper offers an up-to-date capsule summary of a particular piece of ongoing or completed research for the purpose of bringing fellow scientists up to date on activities in their field. A speaker cannot hope to teach the audience the specifics of his work, but he can elicit a valuable appreciation of the research effort and imply the value of the contribution to the growing body of knowledge on the subject.

Lehr, J. H., 1985: Let there be stoning! Ground Water, 23 (2), 162–165.

Image from http://media.zenfs.com

Given this expertise and a recommendation from Mary Golden, I dove into the book. By the end, I was convinced that we scientists could do a lot better in communicating our science to the public. The opportunity arose to give this a test with our latest research article:

Schultz, D. M., and J. M. Sienkiewicz, 2013: Using frontogenesis to identify sting jets in extratropical cyclones. Wea. Forecasting, doi: 10.1175/WAF-D-12-00126.1

I think the combination of the dramatic imagery of the strong winds from the October 1987 storm and explaining the mechanism for the strong winds using a simple conceptual model figure allows for a concise, yet memorable, presentation aimed at the general public.

I especially like the point that the strongest winds occur where the front is weakening most rapidly.

Thanks to Aeron Haworth, Media Relations at the University of Manchester, for working hard to make this video and the accompanying press release.

By now, you may have read about the imagery from the Cassini mission to Saturn. The NASA press release calls it a “large hurricane”. The European Space Agency has a similar release.

Nice false-color imagery, yes. But, bad science.

Hurricanes are storms fueled by the release of latent heat from condensing water that is originally obtained from the storm traveling over warm water. Although the term “hurricane” is specific to storms in the North Atlantic Ocean basin that exceed a certain wind speed, the storms are part of a more general classification called “tropical storms”. Their name “tropical storms” tells you something specific about where they form. Obviously warm water is much more common in the tropics on Earth than farther poleward. But, that doesn’t stop storms fueled by the release of latent heat from forming farther north. Medicanes are like hurricanes that form over the warm waters of the Mediterranean. And, there is a class of polar lows that develop mostly due to the release of latent heat. There was even an article published calling them “Arctic hurricanes.”

So, what does this have to do with the Saturn hurricane?

The press release reveals the problems with calling this circulation a hurricane.

The ESA press release admits the storm is not over a water body. I didn’t see the evidence that the storm is fueled by latent heat release, which is the key characteristic of a hurricane. And, the NASA press release says that it is locked to the North Pole.

“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Just because it looks like the same type of storm on Earth does not mean it is the same. Morphological similarity does not equal dynamical similarity.

Actually, this storm looks like it is embedded within the polar vortex, a planetary-scale circulation driven by the pole-to-equator temperature difference. The polar vortex is a pool of cold air roughly centered on the North and South Poles with the jet stream around the edge. The polar vortex is strongest in the winter.

But perhaps “storm in the polar vortex on Saturn” is not as newsworthy as “hurricane on Saturn”.

On Earth, hurricanes tend to drift northward because of the forces acting on the fast swirls of wind as the planet rotates. The one on Saturn does not drift and is already as far north as it can be.

“The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that’s likely why it’s stuck at the pole,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Hampton, Va.

The fact that it is “stuck” at the pole is further evidence that the scientists are looking at a circulation within the polar vortex. It also ignores the simple fact of why tropical cyclones on Earth travel northward: They often get picked up by waves in the jet stream and brought northward in a process called extratropical transition.

That the North Pole of Saturn was in darkness for so long is consistent with the dynamics of the polar vortex on Earth. The polar vortex is cold core. Hurricanes are warm core. Is the “hurricane” on Saturn cold core or warm core? That is easily determined from radiation emitted from Saturn.

“Scientists will be studying the hurricane to gain insight into hurricanes on Earth, which feed off warm ocean water. Although there is no body of water close to these clouds high in Saturn’s atmosphere, learning how these Saturnian storms use water vapor could tell scientists more about how terrestrial hurricanes are generated and sustained.”

While I wouldn’t begrudge anyone the fascination of studying the atmosphere and its features on other planets, this statement is one of the most over-reaching statements that I’ve ever read in a scientific press release. That we need to look at a some storm on Saturn to understand how Earth’s hurricanes use water vapor is pretty laughable.

I’m not saying that we don’t use analogies to describe our science to the general public. In fact, I’m a big fan of well-crafted analogies that explain scientific concepts to nonscientists. What bothers me is an analogy that misrepresents the scientific understanding, which — as far as I understand this storm on Saturn — is what NASA and ESA are doing by calling this storm a hurricane rather than the polar vortex.

NOTE: Phil Platt’s Bad Astronomy touches upon the fact that it is a polar vortex, but doesn’t go far enough in drawing the distinction between a hurricane and the circulations within the polar vortex.

(Image from NASA)

Brian Curran sends me this article in Government Executive called “8 Tips to Improve Your (And Your Agency’s) Writing”.

This guidance comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, who recently developed a Writing Style Guide. You can download this 114-page PDF here.

After those 8 tips, the author provides this Pop Quiz.

Pop Quiz: Which ending would you pick for this post?

A. It is felt that, in order to utilize proper writing style, agency employees at this point in time should endeavor to utilize a great number of these suggestions which are above for the purpose of improving their writing capabilities.

B. Use these guidelines to improve your writing.

Eugene Garfield

I. “the uncitedness of the mediocre, the unintelligible, the irrelevant, the eccentric.”

II. “the uncitedness of the meritorious but undiscovered or forgotten, the uncitedness of the ‘village Miltons’ of scientific research.”

III. “the uncitedness of distinction that comes to those whose work has become so well known (and presumably been previously so heavily cited) that one finds it at first tedious, then unnecessary, and finally actually gauche to cite such [authors] at all.”

Garfield discusses the conditions under which such Uncitedness III, as he calls it, might occur and examples of how different disciplines might reach that level. For example, in atmospheric science, most people use quasigeostrophic thinking without citing the originators of the theory (e.g., Charney, Phillips). If they do provide a citation, it is to Holton’s textbook, which is the most commonly used dynamics textbook.

So, here’s something to think about in your own discipline: When should work not be cited as being “common knowledge”? Or, should we aim for a science where there is no such thing as Uncitedness III?