Would it surprise you that the thesaurus was written by an obsessive person?
Peter Roget, who wrote Roget’s Thesaurus, came from a family of mental instability: “His grandmother was mentally unstable, his mother was nearly psychotic and his sister and daughter had suffered severe mental breakdowns (Cracked.com, 2012)” But, he loved to make lists. After 12 years of making lists of all words and their relationship to each […]
Microsoft Word grammar checker FAIL: “A climatology”
Have you every seen that the automatic grammar checker in Microsoft Word flags “a climatology” as incorrect? I checked that “a climatological study” does not trigger the green underline, nor does “climatology” without the article “a”. Maybe it is some kind of check to see if someone says “a biology” not followed by a noun […]
The Importance of a Clearly Written and Complete Caption
I never tire of this analogy. For the answer, click here. From Style for Students by Joe Schall.
Why the acknowledgements are important
This recent slate.com article discusses the increasing prevalance of the acknowledgements section in books. It got me thinking about acknowledgements in scientific papers. Some authors use them, others don’t. Some authors thank the reviewers; others don’t. Some authors even thank the Editor; others don’t. Every once in a while you’ll find authors using weather graphics […]
Avoiding pie charts
Are these individual pie charts easy to get quantitative information from? How about when presented like this? As you can see, obtaining quantitative information from pie charts is near impossible. And, if you want to compare two of them, you can generally tell only the most obvious differences. A more carefully constructed plot using horizontal […]
The Posture of Tyrannosaurus rex and the Clash of Air Masses
An article in Journal of Geoscience Education by Ross et al. states, “Today’s students were born well after the dramatic scientific reinterpretations of theropod dinosaur stance and metabolism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, if asked to draw a picture of Tyrannosaurus rex, most of these students will likely draw an animal with […]
Statistical Traps to Avoid #1: Autocorrelation
Eddie Haam and K.K. Tung (2012, J. Atmos. Sci.) examine the purported relationship between the 11-year solar cycle and 2–4-year cycle in La Niña. The authors demonstrate that there is no relationship between these two variables that they have found that is statistically significant. Instead, the autocorrelation between the two quasi-periodic variables is likely to […]
Should you cite operational numerical weather prediction models?
A colleague asked me a question about whether it was necessary to cite any published literature on numerical weather prediction models in your scientific papers. My response follows. I don’t have a rule, and the American Meteorological Society doesn’t either. I’ve seen papers with these models cited and other papers where they are not. My […]
The importance of picking good terminology the first time
In an early paper that I lead authored, I used the term cold surge to describe the cold front associated with the Superstorm of March 1993. 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 […]
The size of figures submitted for peer review
A common concern when reviewing a manuscript is, “Are the figures going to be legible when published in the journal?” Notice how small and unreadable the figure is above. You can click on it to see it in full size.) As you may know, the digital files for the figures are uploaded to the publishers’ […]
