These are critiques and “enhancements” of review literature published in my field by other scientists or reviews of published articles in my field that I was not asked to review beforehand.
Except in one case (i.e., 2003 National Academy of Sciences updated review of cloud seeding research1, I was not asked to review or participate in any way in them. Odd, since they were in my specialty. Oh, well. It could be that I am known as a finicky reviewer; no problematic statements will go unquestioned in something I review. This means that my reviews may be considered lengthy. And, since I began reading technical, journal literature when I was 13 years old (i.e., The Monthly Weather Review) my finicky reviews are because I care a lot about the accuracy of the literature.
I’ve also come to the conclusion in doing these “reviews of reviews” that this type of literature may be the most unreliable of all our publications. I think the reason for this perhaps surprising conclusion is that none of the usually prestigious authors really wanted to do them. Reviews are tough to do, and they get in the way of on going research that may have a deadline. The result? Poor review literature. Here are links to just the ones I have done to date (2023). These are unpublished works:
https://cloud-maven.com/critique-of-ams-monograph-58-chapter-7/
https://cloud-maven.com/cloud-seeding-and-the-journal-barriers-to-faulty-claims-closing-the-gaps/
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Post publication review done in 2017 of a major study of the clouds of Israel that I considered deeply flawed:
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The manuscript reviewing the Israeli cloud seeding experience was rejected by the AMS’ Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 2019. It’s a story of how cloud seeding partisans misled their country into wasting millions of dollars on ineffective cloud seeding:
https://cloud-maven.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-cloud-seeding-in-israel/
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To be submitted:
https://cloud-maven.com/journal-citing-practices-in-a-controversial-domain-cloud-seeding/
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Dickering on whether to submit this one. It rakes the authors over the coals for not citing major work by Professor Peter V. Hobbs and myself in 1995 (extensive comments were published in 1997) that reanalyzed the first two of the four Israeli randomized cloud seeding experiments: My feeling is that OTHERS should comment on the omission of our work. If I do it, it looks like sour grapes. If others do it, it will be taken more seriously.
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Finally, I’ve added a story about what happens when you find something unexpected: that an aircraft can create high concentrations of ice crystals in clouds at much higher temperatures (~-10°C) than was believed possible. This paper was not welcomed; it was rejected twice by a journal. It cast doubt on earlier published airborne research concerning ice particle concentrations in Cumulus clouds when the aircraft made more than one penetration into the same cloud at below freezing temperatures.