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Large Hail Analysis

Decent Essays

Upon reading “The Frequency of Large Hail over the Contiguous United States” by Schaefer et al., I discovered that the abstract was both informative and confusing. This abstract was about the quality of the hail occurrence records and the geographical tendencies that could be found in those records. While the abstract was interesting and highlighted flaws in the data collection method, the abstract itself could have used some improvements. The abstract began with detailing Stan Changnon’s proclivity at studying hail occurrences. Following this was an explanation of the hail data collection process of the Storm Prediction Center (SPC). The authors then illustrated that records of hailfall were separated into discrete size categories that were compared to common objects. They acknowledged that the data records were subject to bias from technology and population distributions. For example, they found that updating weather radars increased hail reports, while urbanization biased reports away from rural areas. Schaefer et al. also showed that occurrences of small hail comprised the majority of all …show more content…

could have improved in this extended abstract. On several occasions, they used abbreviations without definitions. Some of these included “AMS”, “AUG”, “NCDC” and “NWS”. Though these abbreviations would have been common knowledge in the meteorology community, they should have still been defined with their first use. Another off-putting tendency was that the authors referred to Changnon by his first name, which was especially strange since they later referred to him by his last name. Furthermore, there were what appeared to be a few typographical errors in the abstract. For example, in Figures 4, 6, and 7, the nautical mile unit is abbreviated as “nim” instead of “nmi”. Additionally, the tense was not constant in the first paragraph. These changes would have been relative easy for the authors to

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