Data from Field Campaign in Black Forest, Germany, are Red Hot

Published: 1 September 2011

A paper published in a special issue of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society describing the scientific strategy, field phase, and research highlights from the Convective and Orographically-induced Precipitation Study (COPS) was identified this week by Thomson Reuters/Essential Science Indicators as a “Hot Paper” in the field of Geosciences. This designation means it is one of the most-cited papers in this discipline published during the past two years.

“This confirms that we are on the right track with our research yielding significant impact in atmospheric sciences,” said Dr. Volker Wulfmeyer, a scientist at the University of Hohenheim who led the campaign and serves as chair of the COPS International Scientific Steering Committee. Additional comments from Wulfmeyer following the announcement of the ESI “Hot Paper” designation can be found in this Q&A interview on ScienceWatch.com.

Joining numerous international scientific collaborators in 2007, the ARM Mobile Facility collected continuous data as one of several measurement “supersites” situated throughout the Black Forest region for the study. The combination of scientific expertise provided a unique opportunity to obtain comprehensive, high-quality data sets usable for model validation as well as for data assimilation. The ESI Hot Paper, “The Convective and Orographically-induced Precipitation Study (COPS): the scientific strategy, the field phase, and research highlights,” is one of 22 devoted to COPS research in a special issue published by the QJRMS in January 2011.

Essential Science Indicators is an analytical tool for scientists, institutions, countries, and journals to conduct ongoing quantitative analyses of research performance and to track trends in science. Covering a multidisciplinary selection of more than 11,000 journals from around the world, this unique and comprehensive compilation of science performance statistics and science trends data is based on journal article publication counts and citation data from the Thomson Reuters scientific database. Available as a 10-year rolling file, ESI covers 10 million articles in 22 specific fields of research and is updated every two months.