170th Anniversary - Virtual Special Issue
The Royal Meteorological Society publishes seven world-leading science journals with contributions from authors across the world.
We asked our Editors-in-Chief to select two articles from their journal that they considered to be important papers published in the course of their journal’s history.
The following selected articles have been made freely available in celebration of our 170th Anniversary.
International Journal of Climatology
These papers have both been selected as they have been very highly cited (974 and 427 citations respectively) and have proved to have a high impact. They are still of relevance today.
- Richman MB. 1986. Rotation of Principal Components.
- Wolter K, Timlin MS. 2011. El Nino/Southern Oscillation behaviour since 1871 as diagnosed in an extended multivariate ENSO index (MEI.ext)
Weather
The first article selected is editor Gavin’s favourite in a fascinating series doing a whistle-stop tour of the cultural meaning and historical oddities of ice in the east and west. The second has been selected as editor Eddy’s favourite.
- Nakamura J, Cartwright HE. 2017. Hot ice and wondrous strange snow - a history of ice and snow - part 3.
- Burt S. 2007. The Lowest of the Lows… extremes of barometric pressure in the British Isles, part 1–the deepest depressions.
Atmospheric Science Letters
The first is one of the highest cited papers in ASL and particularly relevant with the number of sudden stratospheric warmings we’ve had in recent years. The second has been selected due to its international collaboration and showcasing the benefits of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) data for atmospheric science. The Editors also liked that the lead author is in India, which is an important area for the future of weather science.
- Scaife AA. 2016. Seasonal winter forecasts and the stratosphere
- Shashikanth K, Salvi K, Ghosh S. 2014. Do CMIP5 simulations of Indian summer monsoon rainfall differ from those of CMIP3?
Quarterly Journal
The first article has been selected as it is the first paper attributing climate change over 50 years to rising CO2 concentrations. The following pair taken together, mark the beginning of modern atmospheric data assimilation.
- Callendar GS. 1938. The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature.
- Lorenc AC. 1986. Analysis methods for numerical weather prediction and Talagrand O, Courtier P. 1987. Variational assimilation of meteorological observations with the adjoint vorticity equation. I: Theory
Geoscience Data Journal
The first represents the journals highest cited article and the second because it highlights the value of sharing best practices for data services.
- Merchant C. 2014. Sea surface temperature datasets for climate applications from Phase 1 of the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (SST CCI)
- Slonosky et al. 2019. From books to bytes: A new data rescue tool
Meteorological Applications
The two selected articles represent the most downloaded articles in the history of the journal.
- Palutikof JP, Brabson BB and Adcock ST. 1999. A review of methods to calculate extreme wind speeds
- Tomlinson CJ, Chapman L, Thornes JE. 2011. Remote sensing land surface temperature for meteorology and climatology: a review
WIREs Climate Change
The two selected articles demonstrate the breadth of articles covered by this journal.
- Moser,S. 2010. Communicating climate change: history, challenges, processes and future directions
- Heymann,M. 2010. The evolution of climate ideas and knowledge