Thursday, May 19, 2011

Records number of citations

It has been a little more than a year since I mentioned about "Record number of equations" in a book about cloud microphysics. This time, the record holder is in a different category, that is the number of references used in a journal article. In her 2003 review article*, Prof. Finlayson-Pitts references a total of 367 articles.

If you are not much in the chemical aspects of the sea salt aerosol but want to learn more about the physical and measurement sides of the subject then you can consult to your one-of-the-high-citing books (over 1800 references) from Lewis and Schwarts (2005)**.

With number of my local article collection reaching over 400 and citation listings reaching up to upper 2 and sometimes 3 digits in most of them, scientific literacy has a great place in the life of a PhD student in atmospheric sciences.


References:
*Finlayson-Pitts, B. J., 2003: The tropospheric chemistry of sea salt: A molecular-level view of the chemistry of NaCl and NaBr. Chem. Rev., 103, 4801-4822.

**Lewis, E. R., and S. E. Schwartz, 2005: Sea Salt Aerosol Production: Mechanisms, Methods, Measurements, and Models. American Geophysical Union, Washington, DC.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Aerosol effects figure in IPCC Climate Change 2007 report

Figure 2.10. Schematic diagram showing the various radiative mechanisms associated with cloud effects that have been identified as significant in relation to aerosols (modified from Haywood and Boucher, 2000). The small black dots represent aerosol particles; the larger open circles cloud droplets. Straight lines represent the incident and reflected solar radiation, and wavy lines represent terrestrial radiation. The filled white circles indicate cloud droplet number concentration (CDNC). The unperturbed cloud contains larger cloud drops as only natural aerosols are available as cloud condensation nuclei, while the perturbed cloud contains a greater number of smaller cloud drops as both natural and anthropogenic aerosols are available as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). The vertical grey dashes represent rainfall, and LWC refers to the liquid water content.

IPCC: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, in: Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by: Solomon, S., Qin, D., Manning, M., Chen, Z., Marquis, M., Averyt, K. B., Tignor, M., and Miller, H. L., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, 2007.