Jennifer Catto on scientific methodology
From On the front line: finding how much rain comes from fronts | Jennifer Catto · · Monash Education
“One of the criticisms from a reviewer was that if we had used a slightly different technique, we would have got different answers, which is true. This is why we tested different search areas. There's very rarely a right way of doing something in science; it's more about the best way we can come up with right now.”
On , Jennifer Catto, Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer at SABRE CORP, spoke about scientific methodology during On the front line: finding how much rain comes from fronts | Jennifer Catto on Monash Education.
About Jennifer Catto
Jennifer Catto, a researcher in atmospheric science, gave a talk in 2015 describing her work on weather fronts and their contribution to rainfall. She stated that in the mid-latitudes, 68% of rainfall comes from fronts, a figure she said had not been previously quantified globally. Catto also noted that rainfall from fronts is twice as heavy as non-frontal rainfall, and that her research involved using automated software to identify fronts in gridded observational data. Catto discussed the challenges of scientific publishing, including responding to reviewer criticism about methodology. She said that her work has been used to evaluate climate models, with the goal of understanding how rainfall patterns related to fronts may change in the future. She also mentioned a scientific consensus in Australia that declining rainfall in Perth was due to fewer fronts, but noted that a colleague had found no decline in the number of fronts over the past 30 years.