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 […]
A proposal for determining session chairs
May 29, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Presentations
Are you organizing a meeting? Here is a proposal that you might try to keep your meeting running smoothly. I got the idea from a brain teaser in a book that I read when I was a kid. The story goes like this. You are wanting to buy the slowest boat, so you place an […]
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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’ […]
More thoughts about scientific poster presentations
May 16, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Presentations, Resources
As our academic year comes to an end and our undergraduate and masters students are busy preparing scientific posters of their dissertation research, I am reminded of why I dread having to grade these posters every year. Students usually just dump their manuscript into a poster template and then trim it down until it fits. […]
ISI Impact Factors versus Scopus SJC Factors
May 13, 2013 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing
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. […]
