Oliver Krüger and Frederik Schenk: The Long Run
1 IntroductionJust recently, klimazwiebel released an interview with Reiner Grundmann , in which he reports about his struggles with publishing a somewhat controversial paper. The story we are about to tell and the previous interview fit neatly together.
2 The Story
Half a year ago, we planned to write a comment to Donat et al. (2011) in the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). Because GRL changed its policies regarding comments to already published manuscripts, we prepared a small paper. In the following peer review process we realized that getting published would eventually become difficult. We received two rounds of reviews with GRL, which finally rejected our manuscript.
Later on we revised the manuscript and submitted to the Environmental Research Letters (ERL), where the manuscript was rejected after one round of reviews. After that incidence, we submitted to one open discussion journal, namely Climate of the Past (CP). CP rejected the manuscript immediately at the initial review stage. The initial review, done by one of the editors, is supposed to be a low standard to enter the open discussion, but we failed nevertheless.
In total we received seven reviews that lead to the rejection in three journals in a row. These seven reviews varied in their opinions significantly. They varied from minor comments to major comments. They were either positively or negatively minded. We also received "interesting" comments. For instance, one reviewer suggested that the average of +1 and -1 is 0.
The editor who did the initial review for CP was more open to questions regarding his rejection. He stated that our results would be plausible, but not convincing (even though he believed our results).
After these episodes, we decided to change our publication strategy. We put the manuscript on arXiv.org to make it publicly available. At the same, we submitted to Journal of Climate, from which we are expecting news whether they are willing to start the review process or not.
3 The Manuscript
The manuscript we are talking about is called "Inconsistencies between long-term trends in storminess derived from the 20CR reanalysis and observations" by Krueger, Schenk, Feser, and Weisse.
In the letter to
the editor we wrote: “In the manuscript we analyze storminess derived through a
pressure-based proxy (extreme percentiles of geostrophic wind speed) in the 20th
Century Reanalysis dataset 20CR over the Northeast Atlantic and compare our
findings with results obtained from pressure observations.”
The method
strictly follows Alexandersson et al. (1998, 2000) (their results made it into the last IPCC WG1
report as Fig. 3.41, online at http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-3-41.html).
And continuing: “Our
findings are based on a relatively simple, yet robust method for analyzing
storminess over the large and well studied area of the Northeast Atlantic. The
results point to a marked inconsistency between storminess in the reanalysis
dataset and storminess derived from observations, which casts doubt on the use
of 20CR to describe long term trends, at least in terms of storminess. We
believe that changes in the number of stations assimilated into 20CR are a
plausible explanation for the discrepancies.
The 20th Century
Reanalysis dataset 20CR is a new climate dataset that reaches back to 1871.
Because it is nearly 140 years long, scientists hope to use it for long-term
trend analyses. With our work, we are assessing how realistically 20CR
describes such long-term trends in terms of storminess. We chose to restrict
our analyses to the Northeast Atlantic region as this region has been in the
focus of several studies in the past that deal with storminess. Ideally,
results obtained through 20CR and observations would agree with other, also
because the pressure observations analyzed in those past studies have been very
likely assimilated into 20CR. Unfortunately, as aforementioned, storminess in
20CR and observed storminess differs significantly.”
The manuscript is available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5295
4 Remarks
Despite from being rejected by several journals, we are continuing our struggles, because we believe it is worth to do so. We do not know yet how many approaches it will take us. Even though our manuscript seems quite controversial, we are willing to initiate a discussion about the topic if somebody lets us.
References
Alexandersson, H., T. Schmith, K. Iden, and H. Tuomenvirta, 1998: Long-term variations of the storm climate over NW Europe. The Global Atmosphere and Ocean System, 6 (2), 97–120.
Alexandersson, H., H. Tuomenvirta, T. Schmith, and K. Iden, 2000: Trends of storms in NW Europe derived from an updated pressure data set. Climate Research, 14 (1), 71–73.
Donat, M., D. Renggli, S. Wild, L. Alexander, G. Leckebusch, and U. Ulbrich, 2011: Reanalysis suggests long-term upward trends in european storminess since 1871. Geophysical Research Letters, 38 (14), L14 703.
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