date: Sun, 08 Jun 2008 07:32:00 -0400 from: Michael Mann subject: request for some additional info. to: Phil Jones Hi Phil, I'm continuing to work on your nomination package (here in my hotel room in Trieste--the weather isn't any good!). If its possible for a case to be too strong, we may have that here! Lonnie is also confirmed as supporting letter writer, along w/ Kevin, Ben, Tom K, and Jean J. (4 of the 5 are already AGU fellows, which I'm told is important! Surprisingly, Ben is not yet, nor am I. But David Thompson is (quite young for one of these). I'm guessing Mike Wallace and Susan Solomon might have had something to do w/ that ;) Anyway, I wanted to check w/ you on two things: 1. One thing that people sometimes like to know is the maximum value of "N" where "N" is the number of papers an individual authored/co-authored that have more than N citations. N=40 (i.e., an individual has published at least 40 papers that have each been cited at least 40 times) is supposedly an important threshold for admission in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. I'm guessing your N is significantly greater than that, and it would be nice to cite that if possible. Would you mind figuring out that number and sending--I think it would be useful is really sealing the case. 2. Would you mind considering a minor revision of your 2 page bibliography. In my nomination letter, I'm trying to underscore the diverse areas where you've made major contributions, and I think its well known and obvious to many that two of these are instrumental data and paleoclimate reconstructions. But it occurs to me that it is equally important to stress your work in detection of anthropogenic impacts on climate w/ both models and observations. For example, your early Nature papers w/ Wigley. in '80 and '81 seem to be among the earliest efforts to try to do this (though I don't have copies of the papers, so can't read them!), and that seems very much worth highlighting to me. My suggestion is that you add a category on "Anthropogenic Climate Signal" detection and include this work (say, 8 or so of the key papers in this area including the two early Nature one's w/ Wigley) as well as some of your later work w/ Santer/Tett/Thorne/Hegerl/Barnett. I realize that most of your work in this area isn't as primary author, but I do think it would be helpful to show this side of your research, and I'd like to incorporate that into my nomination letter (i.e. how critical your efforts have been to developments in areas such as D&A). You could still fit this onto 2 pages by making the font smaller for the references (10pt rather than 11 pt) while keeping the headings at 11 pt, and if necessary you could probably sacrifice a few of the surface temperature record references to make space for the additional references. Also, if you happen to have pdfs of the two early Wigley papers, or even just the text for the abstracts, it would be great to have a little more detail about those papers so I can appropriately work them into the narrative of my letter. thanks for any help, mike p.s. please tell Keith I was very sorry he was unable to make it here to Trieste, I was really looking forward to seeing him (as were Ed and many others here). I hope all is well w/ his daughter. -- Michael E. Mann Associate Professor Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC) Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075 503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663 The Pennsylvania State University email: [1]mann@psu.edu University Park, PA 16802-5013 [2]http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm