publications

The Volunteer Power behind Peer Review

by Tony Broccoli, AMS Publications Commissioner

The peer review process is essential for high-quality scientific publication. Most readers of BAMS are aware of this simple fact, but we often hear questions about the many volunteers who take part in the peer review process. What is the difference between editors and associate editors? How do we choose chief editors? To answer these and other questions as part of this year’s Peer Review Week, I will provide a quick look at the roles of volunteers who make the peer review process work.

TonyB

When a manuscript is submitted to one of the 11 technical journals published by AMS, it is examined by the chief editor of that journal. (Two AMS journals, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology and Journal of Climate have two co-chief editors.) If the manuscript meets basic standards of clarity, language, and content, the chief editor will assign an editor to handle it. The handling editor’s area of expertise will typically be consistent with the topic of the manuscript.

The next step for the handling editor is the selection of reviewers for the manuscript. Reviewers are also chosen on the basis of their expertise because they are being asked to make a technical assessment of the manuscript under consideration. Most manuscripts are assigned to two to three reviewers, who are expected to return their reviews in a specified length of time.

Once the reviews of a manuscript have been received, the handling editor is responsible for evaluating them and deciding the outcome of the peer review process. The editor may decide to 1) accept the manuscript without revision (this is quite rare); 2) require minor revisions that will be judged by the editor without further evaluation by the reviewers; 3) require major revisions, after which the revised manuscript will typically be subject to another round of evaluation by the reviewers; or 4) reject the manuscript as unsuitable for publication. In making a decision, the editor is not simply tallying the recommendations of the reviewers, but instead using the reviews to make an informed judgment about the manuscript.

Thus the scientific publication process depends critically on many people who generously donate their time. Reviewers are at the heart of the peer review process; this army of volunteers provides a critical evaluation of each manuscript and offers suggestions on how it can be made stronger. Reviewers who have a history of providing excellent and timely reviews are often invited to become associate editors, who agree to provide more frequent reviews, review manuscripts on short notice, and advise the editors of challenging or difficult cases.

Editors are frequently chosen from the ranks of associate editors who have performed their duties with distinction. Successful editors have certain attributes: they are excellent scientists, they have good judgment, and they have superior time-management skills. Each of these attributes is important for making sound decisions about manuscripts, communicating with authors and reviewers, and managing the unrelenting stream of incoming manuscripts in a timely manner.

Experience and accomplishment in per- forming the duties of an editor are among the primary considerations in identifying candidates for chief editor. Although this may be the most visible position among the volunteers who contribute to the peer review process in AMS Publications, it is by no means the most important. Reviewers, associate editors, editors, chief editors, and the AMS staff who work with them are all crucial to the scientific publishing enterprise. Regardless of which of these roles you occupy, you are making an important contribution to an essential element of scientific research.

To get involved, please follow this link to the AMS publications website.

Saildrone’s Science at the Air–Sea Interface

The Saildrone vehicle returning to San Francisco on 11 Jun 2018. The wind anemometer is visible at the top of the wing and solar panels are on both the wing and the vehicle hull. Image credit: Saildrone/Gentemann.
The Saildrone vehicle returning to San Francisco on June 11, 2018. The wind anemometer is visible at the top of the wing and solar panels are on both the wing and the vehicle hull. Image credit: Saildrone/Gentemann.

 

You’ve heard of drones in the air, but how about on the ocean’s surface? Enter Saildrone: A new wind and solar powered ocean-observing platform that carries a sophisticated suite of scientific sensors to observe air–sea fluxes. Looking like a large windsurfer without the surfer, the sailing drone glides autonomously at 2–8 kts. along the surface of uninhabited oceans on missions as long as 12 months, sampling key variables in the marine environment.

In a recent paper published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, author Chelle Gentemann and her colleagues explain that from April 11 to June 11, 2018, Saildrone cruised on a 60-day round trip from San Francisco down the coast to Mexico’s Guadelupe Island to establish the accuracy of its new measurements. These were made to validate air–sea fluxes, sea surface temperatures, and wind vectors derived by satellites. The automated surface vehicle also studied upwelling dynamics, river plumes, and the air–sea interactions of both frontal and diurnal warming regions on this deployment—meaning Saildrone’s versatile array of instruments got a workout not only above surface but just below it as well, in the water along the hull.

BAMS asked a few questions of the authors to gain insight into their research as well as their backgrounds. A sampling of answers are below:

Chelle Gentemann
Chelle Gentemann

BAMS: What would you like readers to learn from your article?

Chelle Gentemann, Farallon Institute: New measurement approaches are always being developed, allowing for new approaches to science. Understanding a dataset’s characteristics and uncertainties is important to have confidence in derived results.

BAMS: How did you become interested in working with Saildrone?

Gentemann: The ocean is a challenging environment to work in: it can be beautiful but dangerous, and gathering ship observations can require long absences from your family.  I learned about Saildrones in 2016 and wanted to see how an autonomous vehicle might be able to gather data at the air–sea interface and adapt sampling to changing conditions.  There are some questions that are hard to get at from existing remote sensing and in situ datasets; I thought that if these vehicles are able to collect high-quality data, they could be useful for science.

BAMS: How have you followed up on this experiment? 

Gentemann: We sent two more [Saildrones] to the Arctic last Summer (2019) and are planning for two more in 2021.  There are few in situ observations in the Arctic Ocean because of the seasonal ice cover, so sending Saildrones up there for the summer has allowed us to sample temperature and salinity fronts during a record heat wave.

Sebastien de Halleux, Saildrone, Inc.: I believe we are on the cusp of a new golden age in oceanography, as a wave of new enabling technologies is making planetary-scale in situ observations technically and economically feasible. The fact that Saildrones are zero-emission is a big bonus as we try to reduce our carbon footprint. I am excited to engage further with the science community to explore new ways of using this technology and developing tools to further the value of the data collected for the benefit of humanity.

BAMS: What got you initially interested in oceanography?

de Halleux: Having had the opportunity to sail across the Pacific several times, I developed a strong interest in learning more about the 70% of the planet covered by water—only to realize that the challenge of collecting data is formidable over such a vast domain. Being exposed to  the amazing power of satellites to produce large-scale remote sensing datasets was only tempered by the realization of their challenges with fine features, land proximity, and of course the need to connect them to subsurface phenomena. This is how we began to explore the intersection of science, robotics, and big data with the goal to help enable new insights. Yet we are only at the beginning of an amazing journey.

BAMS: What surprises/surprised you the most about Saildrone’s capabilities?

Peter Minnett, Univ. of Miami, Florida: The ability to reprogram the vehicles in real time to focus on sampling and resampling interesting surface features. The quality of the measurements is impressive.

Saildrones are currently deployed around the world. In June 2019 , there were three circumnavigating Antarctica, six in the U.S. Arctic, seven surveying fish stock off the U.S. West Coast and two in Norway, four surveying the tropical Pacific, and one conducting a multibeam bathymetry survey in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2020, Saildrone, Inc. has deployed fleets in Europe, the Arctic, the tropical Pacific, along the West Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and Antarctica. NOAA and NASA-funded Saildrone data are distributed openly and publicly.

Saildrone's Science at the Air–Sea Interface

The Saildrone vehicle returning to San Francisco on 11 Jun 2018. The wind anemometer is visible at the top of the wing and solar panels are on both the wing and the vehicle hull. Image credit: Saildrone/Gentemann.
The Saildrone vehicle returning to San Francisco on June 11, 2018. The wind anemometer is visible at the top of the wing and solar panels are on both the wing and the vehicle hull. Image credit: Saildrone/Gentemann.

 
You’ve heard of drones in the air, but how about on the ocean’s surface? Enter Saildrone: A new wind and solar powered ocean-observing platform that carries a sophisticated suite of scientific sensors to observe air–sea fluxes. Looking like a large windsurfer without the surfer, the sailing drone glides autonomously at 2–8 kts. along the surface of uninhabited oceans on missions as long as 12 months, sampling key variables in the marine environment.
In a recent paper published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, author Chelle Gentemann and her colleagues explain that from April 11 to June 11, 2018, Saildrone cruised on a 60-day round trip from San Francisco down the coast to Mexico’s Guadelupe Island to establish the accuracy of its new measurements. These were made to validate air–sea fluxes, sea surface temperatures, and wind vectors derived by satellites. The automated surface vehicle also studied upwelling dynamics, river plumes, and the air–sea interactions of both frontal and diurnal warming regions on this deployment—meaning Saildrone’s versatile array of instruments got a workout not only above surface but just below it as well, in the water along the hull.

BAMS asked a few questions of the authors to gain insight into their research as well as their backgrounds. A sampling of answers are below:

Chelle Gentemann
Chelle Gentemann

BAMS: What would you like readers to learn from your article?

Chelle Gentemann, Farallon Institute: New measurement approaches are always being developed, allowing for new approaches to science. Understanding a dataset’s characteristics and uncertainties is important to have confidence in derived results.
BAMS: How did you become interested in working with Saildrone?
Gentemann: The ocean is a challenging environment to work in: it can be beautiful but dangerous, and gathering ship observations can require long absences from your family.  I learned about Saildrones in 2016 and wanted to see how an autonomous vehicle might be able to gather data at the air–sea interface and adapt sampling to changing conditions.  There are some questions that are hard to get at from existing remote sensing and in situ datasets; I thought that if these vehicles are able to collect high-quality data, they could be useful for science.
BAMS: How have you followed up on this experiment? 
Gentemann: We sent two more [Saildrones] to the Arctic last Summer (2019) and are planning for two more in 2021.  There are few in situ observations in the Arctic Ocean because of the seasonal ice cover, so sending Saildrones up there for the summer has allowed us to sample temperature and salinity fronts during a record heat wave.
Sebastien de Halleux, Saildrone, Inc.: I believe we are on the cusp of a new golden age in oceanography, as a wave of new enabling technologies is making planetary-scale in situ observations technically and economically feasible. The fact that Saildrones are zero-emission is a big bonus as we try to reduce our carbon footprint. I am excited to engage further with the science community to explore new ways of using this technology and developing tools to further the value of the data collected for the benefit of humanity.
BAMS: What got you initially interested in oceanography?
de Halleux: Having had the opportunity to sail across the Pacific several times, I developed a strong interest in learning more about the 70% of the planet covered by water—only to realize that the challenge of collecting data is formidable over such a vast domain. Being exposed to  the amazing power of satellites to produce large-scale remote sensing datasets was only tempered by the realization of their challenges with fine features, land proximity, and of course the need to connect them to subsurface phenomena. This is how we began to explore the intersection of science, robotics, and big data with the goal to help enable new insights. Yet we are only at the beginning of an amazing journey.
BAMS: What surprises/surprised you the most about Saildrone’s capabilities?
Peter Minnett, Univ. of Miami, Florida: The ability to reprogram the vehicles in real time to focus on sampling and resampling interesting surface features. The quality of the measurements is impressive.
Saildrones are currently deployed around the world. In June 2019 , there were three circumnavigating Antarctica, six in the U.S. Arctic, seven surveying fish stock off the U.S. West Coast and two in Norway, four surveying the tropical Pacific, and one conducting a multibeam bathymetry survey in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2020, Saildrone, Inc. has deployed fleets in Europe, the Arctic, the tropical Pacific, along the West Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and Antarctica. NOAA and NASA-funded Saildrone data are distributed openly and publicly.

What a Launch!…and More GEMS to Follow

Nothing quite like watching lift-off…here’s the video sequence from Arianespace showing the flight of the rocket carrying South Korea’s GEMS satellite instrument into space earlier this week.

GEMS–the Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer–is a centerpiece of the Asian contribution to a triad of geostationary satellite missions watching air quality in some of the most pollution-prone urban centers of the world. The other similar missions to be launched are Sentinel-4 over Europe and TEMPO over North America.

GEMScoverage

The image above superimposes the field of view for each of the satellites over an image of nitrogen dioxide concentrations averaged over the 10 years 2005-2014 from the Ozone Mapping Instrument aboard NASA’s Aura satellite. Aura is part of the “afternoon-train” or A-train of international satellites focused on anthropogenic aerosols. But these satellites pass over any given spot on Earth the same time each day.

With GEMS, such information is now going to be 24/7 for Asia. As a geostationary eye on air quality, the new South Korean satellite watches meteorology and atmospheric chemistry continuously. In addition to GEMS, which uses spectrometers to track ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, aerosols, ultraviolet index, and other health-related factors in the atmosphere, the satellite includes meteorological and ocean color sensors. This gives a synergy to Earth observing at faster sampling rates and higher resolution over the region, advancing investigations of air pollution for a large portion of the world’s population.

The push for geostationary satellite monitoring of air quality that led to the launch of GEMS has been long in the making. In an article 8 years ago in BAMS, W.A. Lahoz explained that geostationary satellites give

an improved likelihood of cloud-free observations …with continuous observations of a particular location during at least part of the day. This “stare” capability …makes it very effective for the retrieval of the lowermost troposphere information for capturing the diurnal cycle in pollutants and emissions, and the import/export of pollutants or proxies for pollutants.

You can read more about the new capabilities in the BAMS article on GEMS by Jhoon Kim (Yonsei Univ.) and colleagues. The article, appropriately, posted online within an hour of the launch of the satellite.

BAMS cover outline 2This is actually a twin launch: The GEMS article is among the first of the new-look BAMS in AMS Journals Online. You’ll find highly readable typefaces with a simple layout easier for scrolling on screen. You’ll also note that we’re starting to publish articles as soon as they’re ready for launch, rather than waiting for them to collect into issues in print.

Also about to launch into the mail is a whole new approach BAMS is taking to print as well. The magazine is much more dense with important and exciting new information. The printed features (mirrored as well in the digital edition for AMS members) are short, highly accessible versions of the peer-reviewed research articles. We’re expanding our focus on new and important articles to relay the authors’ thoughts—in their own words—about their work and the challenges they’re solving in their next articles as well. This blog and AMS social media will reflect such thought-provoking new BAMS content in all sorts of ways—for reading, listening, and watching.

So GEMS is our partner in launch: a new era of air quality monitoring for Asia is paired with a new era of communications for AMS. As they say in the media..stay tuned, more to follow!

Peer Review: A Foundational Component of Our Science

by Keith L. Seitter, CCM, AMS Executive Director
This week we join many other scientific publishers celebrating Peer Review Week to highlight the importance of high-quality peer review in the scientific process. The process of peer reviewing research results has been an indispensable component of the modern scientific enterprise: when scientists talk about having reached a consensus in some area of research, they mean that there is a consensus in the peer-reviewed literature. This week gives us an opportunity to focus on the importance of peer review while also recognizing the dedication of researchers around the world who make considerable commitments of time to ensure its continued success while usually receiving little or no explicit credit for those contributions.
When a researcher submits a manuscript presenting research results to a high-quality journal like those AMS publishes, the editor of the journal selects several experts in relevant specialties to review of the manuscript. These experts make sure the author(s) have carried out their experiments, observations, and/or analysis following sound practices and that their conclusions can be justified from the data and analysis they have provided. In their reviews, these experts identify weaknesses or flaws in experimental design or reasoning and suggest additional research and analysis that might be required, as well as other ways to improve the paper.
The editor collects these peer reviews and determines if the manuscript can be made suitable for publication. If the science is flawed and the paper cannot be made acceptable with a reasonable amount of additional work, the paper is rejected. More than one in three manuscripts submitted to AMS journals are rejected. The editor’s decision is provided to the authors, along with the full set of reviews with the names of the reviewers removed (unless the reviewer chooses otherwise), along with the editor’s decision. If the paper has not been rejected, the authors follow the guidance of the editors and reviewers to revise the paper, which then may face additional peer review under the editor’s direction. If the paper can reach the point that the editor is satisfied with the quality of the work, the manuscript is accepted for publication.
Peer review, even when implemented in the rigorous manner used by AMS, is not perfect, of course. Occasionally important research is initially rejected in peer review, or fundamentally incorrect research survives peer review to publication only to be shown later to be incorrect. Peer review done well, however, greatly reduces the chance of publication of poor or incorrect science, and experience has shown that overall the process is extremely successful. That is why scientists depend virtually exclusively on results presented in rigorously peer-reviewed journals and why major scientific assessments—like the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—rely on peer-reviewed literature from well-established, high-quality journals like those published by AMS.
Astute readers will have noticed that I refer to “high quality journals” multiple times above. It is important to make that distinction because there are journals vying for authors’ papers (and the income they provide) that do not put the time or expense into doing peer review with the rigor employed by the AMS journals. Authors, and the scientific enterprise itself, are best served by those journals that invest the resources needed to do the peer review to the highest standards. AMS journals enjoy membership in the elite group of such high quality journals that serve the atmospheric and related sciences.
Let me close with note of appreciation for those who maintain the very high standards of peer review for the AMS journals.  While the professional staff at AMS does a wonderful job of ensuring smooth and expedient reviews, as part of a positive author experience that is among the best in scientific publishing, it is the volunteers who serve as chief editors, editors, associate editors, and reviewers who dedicate the time and energy to maintain the AMS journals as world-class publications. And the reviewers especially deserve credit given that their efforts are, by design, mostly done anonymously for the collective good of science. All of us owe these dedicated individuals our thanks.

AMS on the Air Podcast: Alexandra Cranford Talks about Women in TV Meteorology

The largest biographical study to date of TV meteorologists shows some disturbing disadvantages for women in the profession.  You can hear Alexandra Cranford, the author of that study, discuss the study on the latest episode of our podcast, AMS on the Air.
Cranford, who is an AMS Certified Broadcaster with WWL-TV in New Orleans, made an exhaustive survey of online information for more than 2,000 weathercasters. She focused on the relation between her colleagues’ professional status and education. The results, which formed the basis of her BAMS article, show women meteorologists have made gains on local TV, yet are not proportionately well represented in the most prominent and prized positions on local stations.
For example, women are much more likely to be on TV during daytime, mornings, and weekends, than on prime time slots:
CranfordChart
And they are far less likely to be chief meteorologist for their station:
CranfordChart2
In the podcast interview, she speculates on some of the reasons for these findings.

Perhaps when a hiring manager is interviewing a man versus a woman as a weathercaster, they are looking at slightly different criteria….Another thing is, maybe women are choosing for some reason…perhaps to work maybe weekends and mornings. Maybe women are staying away from those chief positions for some reason. I have no idea if this is the case—I’m just throwing out ideas here—but…possibly due to family reasons or personal preference. That could maybe be another thing.
Also, women may choose to exit the industry earlier in their careers, so that leaves a pool of mainly older, more experienced, mainly males to fill those chief spots, which are typically filled by an older, more experienced person.
And then, one of the reviewers of my study brought my attention to the effect that all of us think about—but how much of a real effect might it have?—the effects of criticisms of consultants and social media and so forth. We all know about the internet trolls. Anyone who works as a TV weathercaster, I’m sure has gotten emails from viewers….That’s a very real thing too. There is research that suggests maybe that’s a bit worse for females versus males. Maybe that can play a role as well.

Listen to the whole interview on the AMS website or on your favorite podcast app.

1871 Hawaii Hurricane Strike Shows Lane's Imminent Danger Isn't Unprecedented

Powerful Hurricane Lane is forecast to skirt if not directly hit Hawaii as a slowly weakening major hurricane today and Friday. Its track is unusual: most Central Pacific hurricanes either steer well south of the tropical paradise or fall apart upon approaching the islands. But a recent paper in the Bulletin of the AMS reveals that such intense tropical cyclones menace Hawaii more frequently than previously thought.
Hurricane Lane as of Thursday morning local time was packing sustained winds of 130 mph with gusts topping 160. Its expected track (below) is northward toward the middle islands today and early tomorrow, followed by a sharp left turn later Friday. When that left hook occurs will determine the severity of the impacts on Maui as well as Oahu, home to Hawaii’s capital and largest city, Honolulu. Although Lane is expected to slowly weaken due to increasing wind shear aloft, it appears that the Big Island of Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, and Oahu will be raked at a minimum by tropical storm winds gusting 55-70 mph, pounding surf, and heavy, potentially flooding rain. Hurricane conditions on these islands also are possible.

Three-day track forecast for Hurricane Lane's approach to Hawaii.
Three-day track forecast for Hurricane Lane’s approach to Hawaii (Central Pacific Hurricane Center).

The last major hurricane to affect the islands with more than swells and heavy surf was Hurricane Iniki in 1992. It was passing well south of the islands when an approaching upper-air trough brought in steering flow out of the south, and Iniki made a right turn toward the western islands while intensifying into a strong Category 4 hurricane. It slammed directly into the garden island of Kauai with average winds of 145 mph and extreme gusts that damaged or destroyed more than 90 percent of the homes and buildings on the island. Iniki obliterated  Kauai’s lush landscape, seen in its full splendor in such movies as Jurassic Park, which was filming there as the storm bore down.
The only other known direct hit on Hawaii was by 1959’s Hurricane Dot, which was a minimal Category 1 storm–the winds barely reaching threshold hurricane intensity of 74 mph when its center crossed Kauai. Without any prior record of major hurricane landfall, Iniki was not just rare, it was considered unprecedented.
Until now.
More than a century before Iniki, a major hurricane crashed into the Big Island, its intense right-front quadrant passing directly over neighboring Maui, causing widespread devastation on both islands. Its discovery is outlined in Hurricane with a History: Hawaiian Newspapers Illuminate an 1871 Storm, which details the narrative thanks to an explosion of literacy on the islands in the mid 19th century, which led to hundreds of local language newspapers that published eyewitness accounts of the storm.
Map showing the reconstructed track of the Hawaii hurricane across the eastern islands of Hawaii and Maui on 9 Aug 1871. Labeled red circles indicate the approximate time and location of the core of the storm. Green shading shows terrain altitude every 2,000 ft (610 m).
Map showing the reconstructed track of the Hawaii hurricane across the eastern islands of Hawaii and Maui on 9 Aug 1871. Labeled red circles indicate the approximate time and location of the core of the storm. Green shading shows terrain altitude every 2,000 ft (610 m).

The new historical research, published in the January 2018 BAMS, found unequivocal evidence of an intense hurricane that struck August 9, 1871, causing widespread destruction from Hilo on the eastern side of the Big Island to Lahaina on Maui’s west side. A Hawaiian-language newspaper archive of more than 125,000 pages digitized and now made publicly available along with translated articles contained account after account of incredible damage that led the paper’s authors to surmise that at least a Category 3 if not a Category 4 hurricane hit that day.
The paper’s analysis is put forth as “the first to rely on the written record from an indigenous people” of storms, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and other extreme natural events. Accounts published in Hawaiian newspapers create a living history of the 1871 hurricane’s devastation, as recounted in the paper:
“On the island of Hawaii, the hurricane first struck the Hāmākua coast and Waipi‘o valley. The following is from a reader’s letter from Waipi‘o dated 16 August 1871:”

At about 7 or 8 AM it commenced to blow and it lasted for about an hour and a half, blowing right up the valley. There were 28 houses blown clean away and many more partially destroyed. There is hardly a  tree  or  bush  of  any  kind  standing  in  the  valley (Pacific Commercial Advertiser on 19 August 1871).

“An eyewitness from Kohala on Hawaii Island wrote the following:”

The greatest fury was say from 9 to 9:30 or 9:45, torrents of rain came with it. The district is swept as with the besom of destruction. About 150 houses were blown down. A mango tree was snapped as a pipe stem, just above the surface of the ground. Old solid Kukui trees, which had stood the storms of a score of years were torn up and pitched about like chaff. Dr. Wright’s mill and sugarhouse, the trash and manager’s residence, were all strewn over the ground (Ke Au Okoa on 24 August 1871).

“On Maui, newspaper reports document that Hāna, Wailuku, and Lahaina were particularly hard-hit. A writer in Hāna described the storm:”

Then the strong, fierce presence of the wind and rain finally came, and the simple Hawaiian houses and the wooden houses of the residents here in Hāna were knocked down. They were overturned and moved by the strength of that which hears not when spoken to (Ka Nupepa Kuokoa on 26 August 1871).

“In Wailuku the bridge was destroyed:”

… the bridge turned like a ship overturned by the carpenters, and it was like a mast-less ship on an unlucky sail.” (Ka Nupepa Kuokoa on 19 August 1871).

“From Lahaina came the following report:”

It commenced lightly on Tuesday night, with a gentle breeze, up to daylight on Wednesday, when the rain began to pour in proportion, from the westward, veering round to all points, becoming a perfect hurricane, thrashing and crashing among the trees and shrubbery, while the streams and fishponds overflowed and the land was flooded (Pacific Commercial Advertiser on 19 August 1871).

The BAMS paper concludes that the 1871 hurricane was “a compact storm, similar to Iniki.” Honolulu escaped damaging winds or rain despite such a close encounter.
Because such historical records have been unnoticed for so long, the paper notes “a number of myths have arisen such as ‘the volcanoes protect us,’ ‘only Kauai gets hit,’ or ‘there is no Hawaiian word for hurricane.’”
Today’s powerful Hurricane Lane and the newfound historical records go a long way to dispelling these misconceptions about the threat of hurricanes in the Hawaiian Islands.
 

Peer Review Week 2017: 4. Shifting Demands of Integrity

For Journal of Hydrometeorology Chief Editor Christa Peters-Lidard, peer review upholds essential standards for a journal. “Maintaining that integrity is very important to me,” she said during an interview at the AMS Publications Commission meeting in Boston, in May. Historically, the burden of integrity has fallen on editors as much as authors and reviewers.

The peer review process we follow at the AMS is an anonymous process. Authors do not know who their reviewers are. So it’s really up to us, as the editors and chief editors, to ensure that the authors have a fair opportunity to not only get reviews that are constructive and not attacking them personally, but also by people that are recognized experts in the field.

Even when reviewers are not experts, “they know enough about it to ask the right questions, and that leads the author to write the arguments and discussion in a way that, in the end, can have more impact because more people can understand it.”
Anonymity has its advantages for upholding integrity, especially in relatively small field, like hydrometeorology. Peters-Lidard pointed anonymity helps reviewers state viewpoints honestly and helps authors receive those comments as constructive, rather than personal.
“In my experience there have been almost uniformly constructive reviews,” Peters-Lidard says, and that means papers improve during peer review. “Knowing who the authors are, we know what their focus has been, where their blind spots might be, and how we can lead them to recognize the full scope of the processes that might be involved in whatever they’re studying. Ultimately that context helps the reviewer in making the right types of suggestions.
But the need for integrity is subtly shifting its burden onto authors more and more heavily. Peters-Lidard spoke about the trend in science towards an end-to-end transparency in how conclusions were reached. She sees this movement in climate assessment work, for example, where the policy implications are clear. Other peer reviewed research developing this way.

We’re moving the direction where ultimately you have a repository of code that you deliver with the article….Part of that also relates to a data issue. In the geosciences we speak of ‘provenance,’ where we know not only the source of the data—you know, the satellite or the sensor—but we know which version of the processing was applied, when it was downloaded, and how it was averaged or processed. It’s back to that reproducibility idea a little bit but also there are questions about the statistical methods….We’re moving in this direction but we’re not there yet.

Hear the full interview:

Peer Review Week 2017: 3. Transparency Is Reproducibility

David Kristovich, chief editor of the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, explains how AMS peer review process, as a somewhat private process, ultimately produces the necessary transparency.
Peer review is an unpublished exchange between authors, editors and reviewers. It is meant to assure quality in a journal. At the same time, Kristovich noted that peer review is not just something readers are trusting, blindly. Rather, the peer review process is meant to lead to a more fundamental transparency—namely, it leads to papers that reveal enough to be reproducible.
“Transparency focuses on the way we tend to approach our science,” Kristovich said during an interview at the AMS Publications Commission meeting in Boston in May. “If someone can repeat all of the steps you took in conducting a study, they should come up with the same answer.”
“The most important part of a paper is to clearly define how you did all the important steps. Why did I choose this method? Why didn’t I do this, instead?”
Transparency also is enhanced by revealing information about potential biases, assumptions, and possible errors. This raises fundamental questions about the limits of information one can include in a paper, to cover every aspect of a research project.
“Studies often take years to complete,” Kristovich pointed out. “Realistically, can you put in every step, everything you were thinking about, every day of the study? The answer is, no you can’t. So a big part of the decision process is, ‘What is relevant to the conclusions I ended up with?’”
The transparency of scientific publishing then depends on peer review to uphold this standard, while recognizing that the process of science itself is inherently opaque to the researchers themselves, while they’re doing their work.
“The difference between scientific research and development of a product, or doing a homework assignment—thinking about my kids—is that you don’t know what the real answer is,” Kristovich said. Science “changes your thinking as you move along, so at each step you’re learning what steps you should be taking.”
You can hear the entire interview here.

Peer Review Week 2017: 2. What Makes a Good Review?

peer review week banner
At the AMS Annual Meeting panel on Peer Review last January, journal editors Tony Broccoli, Carolyn Reynolds, Walt Robinson, and Jeff Rosenfeld spoke about how authors and reviewers together make good reviews happen:
Robinson: If you want good reviews, and by good I mean insightful and constructive and that are going to help you make your paper better, the way to do that is to write a really good paper. Make sure your ducks are in a row before you send it in. You should have read over that and edited it multiple times. I’m going to, at some point in my life, write a self-help book in which the single word title is, “Edit!” because it applies to many parts of life. Have your colleagues—not even the co-authors—look at it. Buy the person in the office next door a beer to look over the paper and get their comment. There may be problems with the science–and none of our science is ever perfect–but if it’s a really well constructed, well formulated, well written paper, that will elicit really good reviews.
The flip side of that is, if the paper is indecipherable, you’ll get a review back saying, “I’m trying to figure this out” with a lot of questions, and often it’s major revisions. (We don’t reject that many things out of the box.)
The problem is, the author goes back and finally makes the paper at a standard he or she should have sent in the first time. It goes back to the reviewer, and then the reviewer understands the paper and comes back and starts criticizing the science. Then the author gets angry…”You didn’t bring that up the first time!” Well, that’s because the reviewer couldn’t understand the science the first time. So, if you want good, constructive reviews, write good papers!
Reynolds:  You want to make things as easy as possible for the reviewers. Make the English clear, make the figures clear. Allow them to focus on the really important aspects.
Broccoli: I would add, affirming what Walt said, that the best reviews constructively give the authors ideas for making their papers better. Some reviewers are comfortable taking the role as the gatekeeper and trying to say whether this is good enough to pass muster. But then maybe they aren’t as strong as need be at explaining what needs to be done to make the paper good enough. The best reviews are ones that apply high standards but also try to be constructive. They’re the reviewers I want to go back to.
Rosenfeld: I like Walt’s word, “Edit.” Thinking like an editor when you are a reviewer has a lot to do with empathy. In journals, generally, the group of authors is identical or nearly the same as the group of readers, so empathy is relatively easy. It’s less true in BAMS, but it still applies. You have to think like an editor would, “What is the author trying to do here? What is the author trying to say? Why are they not succeeding? What is it that they need to show me?” If you can put yourself in the shoes of the author—or in the case of BAMS, in the shoes of the reader—then you’re going to be able to write an effective review that we can use to initiate a constructive conversation with the author.
Broccoli: That reminds me: Occasionally we see a reviewer trying to coax the author into writing the paper the reviewer would have written, and that’s not the most effective form of review. It’s good to have diverse approaches to science. I would rather the reviewer try to make the author’s approach to the problem communicated better and more sound than trying to say, “This is the way you should have done it.”