“A picture is worth a thousand words”, says the popular adage. It is something that we, as climate scientists, should take seriously, especially given the vast quantities of literature we might read through.
I have certainly noticed that the quality of figures in climate science papers has improved over recent years, probably partly due to better tools being available, but perhaps also authors being more aware of the impact of figures. However, there are still some terrible and confusing figures in papers.
Does anyone want to suggest some excellent, published, visually appealing and useful climate-related figures that we might collect? nicefigure.org has done this across all sciences for example.
UPDATE: There is now a dedicated Better Figures blog discussing climate figures.
I’ll start with a figure from Baldwin & Dunkerton, showing an influence of the stratosphere on the troposphere.
Caption: Weather from above. A weakening (red) or strengthening (blue) stratospheric vortex can alter circulation down to the surface. The diagrams show composites of the NAM index. The thin horizontal line indicates the approximate tropopause (Baldwin and Dunkerton, 2001).
There’s got to be more than one…