Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Meteorological Applications

It is with great pride that we mark the 30th anniversary of the journal Meteorological Applications, and we take this opportunity to provide our readers with a review of the journal's accomplishments to date and with historical context. Indeed, this journal belongs to the forecasters, applied meteorologists, climate scientists and all users or providers of meteorological and climate services, including early career scientists and both graduate and undergraduate students who read and publish contributions on all aspects of meteorological science, including both weather and climate. We hope that in this editorial we can share with our readers the pleasure that we have had in revisiting our journal's history and the excitement we feel while looking toward the future of our “Met Apps.”

Founding Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Bob Riddaway, shared many stories with us so that we could give our readers a taste of what it was like to produce Met Apps in its early days. Bob told us that Professor Keith Browning approached him about the idea of creating a new journal for the publication of applied meteorological papers. Bob named our journal specifically to stand out from the plethora of journals at the time that were named “The Journal of…” and he also came up with our nickname “Met Apps.”

When Met Apps was first published, it was delivered as a paper journal via a subscription service in the post. No online magic in 1994! The journal was published four times per year, and Bob had to make the journey to Bristol each time to proofread every page before it could be printed and distributed. The entire submission and review process of manuscripts was conducted via post which, you can imagine, slowed down time to publication when compared with today.

In 1994, the published scope described Met Apps as including “Science and technology needed to support meteorological applications.” Today Met Apps has a tagline encapsulating that spirit and also showing how climate is relevant to our journal: “Science and Technology for Weather and Climate.”

The aims and scope has changed very little, and throughout its life, Met Apps has constantly strived to increase the depth and range of contributions from scientists, forecasters and industry colleagues from all over the world and to provide a positive author experience for all. We think that we can still achieve this by continuing to improve practices that lead to fairness, transparency and prompt and in–depth, expert scientific reviews that are not coloured by bias.

In recent years, we have made quite a few changes to the submission and review processes, always keeping the above goals in mind.

Our authors can now benefit from an easier submission process as Met Apps has moved to a free-format submission process. This also supports accessibility, as there is no longer any requirement for templates or specific software to be used to create a manuscript. We have also made some adjustments (and simplifications) to our author guidelines. We now encourage more visually accessible figures and colour schemes by providing guidance on the uses of colour in particular. This ensures that our colour-blind readers can access the information in the journal's papers. It also improves the impact of the figures we publish to clearly communicate the scientific content of research to all readers. The guidelines now provide instructions for submitting author-made video abstracts which can add a new dimension to an author's work and help to attract new readers to the article.

Furthermore, in 2021, we began changing the review process to a double-blind approach. Traditionally, most scientific journals like Met Apps offer anonymity to reviewers but not to authors. Instead, with a double-blind approach, the manuscript is anonymised, i.e., authors' names and institutional affiliations, as well as, acknowledgements, grant numbers or any other information that could reveal the authors' identities, are removed from the pages. By taking this approach we liberate reviewers from their own possible unconscious biases. This results in the freedom to comment on the work alone and not worry about offending a colleague. We hasten to add that the reviewers' comments to authors are consistently polite, helpful and honest. This method of review reassures the authors that it is their scientific work that is being evaluated and critiqued and not any comment on their gender, ethnic origin or institutional affiliation. It has taken some time for the Met Apps team and authors to learn how to effectively anonymise manuscripts, but now we are confident that we are removing barriers and biases, and creating a fairer review process.

To further support our review process to diversify the geographical origin of authors coming to the journal, we continue to expand the composition and expertise of our Editorial Board while trying to promote gender parity. At the time of writing this editorial, the board consisted of 16 women and 19 men. The international reach of our Editorial Board extends to Asia, Europe, North and South America, and we continue to look for Associate Editors from African and Australasian countries.

Since becoming a fully Open Access journal, we have seen article production times decrease and an important growth in international downloads of articles through increased accessibility. We have also seen an increased quality in the submissions we are receiving, as well as some extremely topical special issues.

In 2023, fifteen papers were published in a Special Issue entitled “Atmospheric processes and applications in urban, coastal, and mountainous terrain” (Guest editors Lorenzo Giovannini and Meinolf Kossmann). This special issue was a diverse collection of important contributions to Met Apps and each paper therein has been subsequently cited. There are currently three Special Issues with open calls for papers: “For a future informed by science at the climate-ecology interface” (Guest editors Vicky Boult, Debbie Bassett, James Bullock, Michael Dietze, Luke Evans and Gerbrand Koren), “Interactions between air pollution and weather/climate from urban to global scales” (Guest Editors: Meng Gao, Xin Huang, Mengmeng Li, Yucong Miao, and Claudio Mazzoleni) and “Land-Atmosphere interactions influencing weather and climate” (Guest editors Krishna Kishore Osuri, A. P. Dimri, Sandipan Mukherjee, Jagabandhu Panda, and Rebecca Emerton). We are also anticipating a couple of sector-relevant special issues as some of our Associate Editors engage in research with industrial partners. These Associate Editors have been actively seeking out interactions with both the insurance and energy sectors to enhance and support the relationship between Met Apps and researchers in these industries. In June 2024, we will be opening a Special Issue on the topic of forecast verification. This is fitting on the 30th anniversary of Met Apps because our first special issue in 2008 was also on this important topic.

Over the course of the past few years, we have also seen an increasing number of submissions to Met Apps that centre on weather applications in the context of a changing climate. We are encouraging more of these types of submissions, and we have the expertise on the board to handle reviews of such manuscripts.

We are pleased to report that Met Apps has increased its impact factor steadily over time. Before 2009, the impact factor was less than one. Ten years ago, in 2014, the impact factor was 1.34. In the past 5 years, we have seen the impact factor exceed two, starting at 1.69 in 2019, increasing to 2.12 in 2020 and 2.45 in 2021. The latest impact factor that has been announced was 2.70 in 2022. We think that the increase in number of citations is partly a result of the change to open access, but also due to the increased quality of submissions the journal is receiving as it is recognised as a high-quality journal in which to publish research concerning applications in meteorology and climate.

Met Apps aims to continue being an innovative journal in the portfolio of Royal Meteorological Society journals. We are particularly keen to develop the journal in response to the experiences and practices of emerging researchers. Thus, we are excited to be launching a new initiative in 2024: the Early Career Researcher (ECR) Board. Although the ECR board is a novel concept to Royal Meteorological Society journals, these boards have been very successfully introduced in other disciplines. Met Apps is setting up this ECR Board to increase the interest in, and understanding of, editorial activities in emerging researchers and remove some of the ‘invisible barriers’ between journal processes and ECRs. We hope that this role will give the ECR board members valuable insight into the editorial processes of a respected journal and provide excellent networking opportunities as well as the chance to develop projects and activities attached to a scientific journal. The ECR Board will help the Editorial Board, consisting of Associate Editors and two co-Editors-in-Chief, to innovate and improve Met Apps' practices and procedures. We also think that the ECR board will help widen the audience and author pool of the journal to bring in more and even better submissions to the journal.

We celebrate the progress that has been made over the years that is due to the dedication and hard work of past Editors-in-Chief, past and present Associate Editors, the Wiley publishing Team, Royal Meteorological Society staff and countless reviewers for the journal who maintain high standards and help the journal improve its practices and output. Met Apps' continued success is due to their integrity, hard work and dedication. All of these people work towards producing not only a journal of high scientific quality but also a journal where we try our best to ensure that the authors' experience is a positive one. We are, of course, extremely grateful to our authors who continue to entrust their research for publication with us, and we hope that they continue to choose to publish with us in the future.

Early in our tenure, we wrote an editorial (Charlton-Perez & Zardi, 2020) mapping our plans for the journal, and we think that we have exceeded our initial goals. We have increased our ambitions for Met Apps. With new initiatives in the pipeline and a fantastic community around us, we see a bright future for Met Apps!

Cristina Charlton-Perez: Writing – original draft; writing – review and editing; conceptualization. Dino Zardi: Conceptualization; writing – original draft; writing – review and editing.