DL: Yes and no. The journal originated when Gene Rasmusson was president of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and Eric Wood was on the AMS council, in the later 1990s. AMS really wanted a presence in hydrology, and the land–atmosphere interactions area. There had been discussion of an AMS "hydrology journal" for some time—GEWEX (the Global Energy and Water Experiment) had been around for almost 10 years, and had helped to coalesce a community in the land–atmosphere interactions area. But it took Gene (who early in his career had been a hydrologist at one of the National Weather Service River Forecast Centers) and Eric to get the AMS council to endorse the idea.

“…JHM developed a niche in the land–atmosphere interactions area…and has become the journal of choice for work in that area.”

Once I was given the charge of getting the journal going, the question was how, and what the response would be. While I had been an Associate and Deputy Editor of Water Resources Research, and had handled special issues of various journals, I’d never had the experience of being chief editor, especially of a journal that didn’t yet exist. It was something of a question as to what the response would be. The approach I took was to go out with letters to about 50 well-known people in the field, and ask them to send in papers for the first issue (this started about a year before the first issue was published, in early 1999). As an aside, I carefully read through and signed all of the letters, and asked my secretary to mail them out. She assigned the task of stuffing the letters into envelopes to a student assistant, who somehow managed to shuffle the envelopes. The result was about two days later I started getting a flood of emails, e.g., from Joe saying he’d received a letter asking Harry to submit a paper to JHM, and so on. So, we made a great impression as to our organizing skills right from the beginning.

In the end though, we did get a pretty good response. As I recall, about 50 papers were submitted the first year, to a journal that hadn’t yet been published. The one thing that I didn’t understand at that point was the impact of the AMS "brand name." AMS really helped publicize the journal – with full-page ads in BAMS (the Bulletin of the AMS, which goes to all members). Also, BAMS published on its cover one of the key figures from a paper that was to appear in V1 N1 of JHM by Koster et al. on seasonal-to-interannual precipitation predictability. That paper turned out to be widely cited (about 75 times to date), and the cover visual fairly widely used in presentations and so on. I think it was a major boost for the journal to get that publicity.

Nonetheless, early in the life of the journal there was always a bit of concern about keeping the "pipeline" of papers in process flowing. AMS (and Keith Seitter, who was then AMS Director of Publications) showed a lot of faith in the journal by deciding that it would go directly to bimonthly publication (they could have started with quarterly). For the first year or so I was always getting emails wanting to know when more papers would be ready for the copy editors. By the end of year two or so, though, that was no longer an issue.

WK: I’ve been Chief Editor for about a year now, only the second editor of this journal. In 2004, we had 126 papers submitted in the areas of precipitation, snow and rainfall-runoff hydrology, land–atmosphere modeling, atmospheric water cycling and remote sensing. Dennis Lettenmaier, his editors, and the editorial assistants are largely responsible for its current status as a highly cited journal.

DL: Well, good people have decided to publish there, and when that happens people read the journal, and the papers are cited. It is sort of a positive-feedback system, which I think all goes back to getting good people to publish interesting work in early issues of the journal. Their decisions (of course I am guessing here) had to do with the fact that it is an AMS journal, and that we worked hard to do a thorough, but prompt, job of reviewing.

DL: Not that I can think of. I don’t know the exact numbers, but there is a cumulative effect with a new journal. Obvious there can’t be many citations early on, because there aren’t many papers published. Also, the reputation of the journal is unknown. I think that what happened is that the journal snowballed, as the papers were published, people saw that good papers were being published there, and wrote their own papers which cited the ones they’d read.

DL: I think that a commitment from AMS, with no looking back (e.g., going directly to six issues per year) was a major factor. Also, there has been some disgruntlement about other journals in the field being slow to review and so on. In the end, though, that’s probably a minor factor. What’s more important is that JHM developed a niche in the land–atmosphere interactions area (both for weather and climate), and has become the journal of choice for work in that area.

DL: Probably just general growth in interest in land–atmosphere interactions—both field campaigns, like the Southern Great Plains and Soil Moisture Experiment series, and a lot of modeling work on land–atmosphere interactions.

WK: I echo Dennis’ response and would also specifically mention that these and other field experiments in cold regions, namely the Cold Land Processes Experiments, have remote sensing as a key driver in their design and execution. The hydrology and atmospheric communities now recognize the fact that linking remote-sensing information with models has great potential for improving predictions/forecasts and in advancing the development of scaling techniques.

DL: To provide a home to work in land–atmosphere interactions.

WK: I would add that this journal also serves as a forum for remote-sensing applications to hydrometeorology, particularly in the areas of remote sensing of precipitation, soil moisture, and evapotranspiration. With remote sensing as a key component in many of the large interdisciplinary field experiments, JHM should be the journal of choice for publication of research results from these field campaigns.

DL: To foster research in land surface hydrology and land–atmosphere interactions. JHM should be the journal of choice for publication of research in this area.

WK: I would also point out that snow hydrologists/meteorologists are actively searching for a journal that they would like to call home, and are eager to publish a special issue in JHM. I am also promoting the publication of observational studies that lead to greater insights to the factors governing land surface-atmosphere exchange. In many cases, these studies lead to significant progress and need a home. Finally, I would like to see JHM as the journal of choice for the publication of land data assimilation research.

Journal of Hydrometeorology
American Meteorological Society, publishers