BAMOS April 2025
16 Article
JSHESS: an increasingly popular journal with growing impact
Roger Dargaville, AMOS representative on the JSHESS Board( roger. dargaville @ monash. edu)
If you haven’ t already published in the Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems Science( JSHESS), why haven’ t you? JSHESS has undergone a dramatic revamp in recent years, with CSIRO Publishing now running the journal logistics, and a renewal of the editorial group meaning a fresh, more dynamic journal with quick turn-around times, and an impact factor on an upward trajectory.
JSHESS is both open source— no cost to view the articles— and has no page charges, so it’ s free for authors to publish. This is achieved through generous support from the BOM and AMOS.
An impact factor on the rise
Currently, the journal’ s impact factor is 2.5, slightly down from its peak of 3.6 in 2022, but significantly higher than the historical average. According to Scimago Scientific Journal Rankings( SJR), JSHESS sits at number 14( out of 140) in the Atmospheric Science category with an SJR of 1.84, placing it in the top 25 %. So while it’ s not the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, it holds its own in the pack. And if you’ re a student looking to publish your work, in addition to being a quality journal to be published in, there is also a generous annual prize for the best student paper which includes an invited talk at the AMOS conference. The 2024 winner was Nahuel Bautista( National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Buenos Aires), whose article examined biogenic CO 2 fluxes over southeastern South America and their uncertainties under different synoptic conditions.
A new editorial team
JSHESS’ s editorial team is well-known to the AMOS community. The editor-in-chief is Professor Steven Siems from Monash University, an expert in cloud microphysics and boundary layer meteorology with a focus on the Southern Ocean. The editors are Dr Peter May, the BOM’ s former Head of Research and an expert in radar remote sensing, also affiliated with Monash University, and Associate Professor Andrea Taschetto from UNSW, an expert in El Niño-Southern-Oscillation and climate variability. The full list of Associate Editors can be found on the JSHESS website and includes several AMOS members and colleagues from other Southern Hemisphere countries including Brazil, Argentina and South Africa, as well as Singapore and Switzerland.
Research highlights
Nineteen papers were published in three issues in the 2024 volume. The most highly downloaded paper is Matej Lipar’ s paper ' Tornado scar on the Nullarbor Plain, Australia ', where the author used remote sensing to identify the impact of an F2 or F3 tornado that occurred in November 2022. The story was also reported in The Conversation and gained mainstream media attention including from the ABC. The next most-read article is ' Global-scale future climate projections from ACCESS model contribution to CMIP6 ' from the CSIRO team led by Serena Schroeter. The paper describes how the updated version of the ACCESS coupled model( CM2) exhibits higher climate sensitivity compared to earlier versions, resulting in higher surface temperatures and more rapid sea ice decline.
The most highly cited JSHESS article from the past three years is Robin Webb et al.’ s paper ' ACCESS-S2: the upgraded Bureau of Meteorology multi-week to seasonal prediction system ', with 36 citations according to Web of Science. This is followed by Jules Kajtar et al.’ s paper ' A catalogue of marine heatwave metrics and trend for the Australian Region ', and Andrew Marshall et al.’ s paper ' Influence of the Madden-Julian Oscillation on multiweek prediction of Australian rainfall extremes using the ACCESS-S1 prediction system ', with 17 and 18 citations respectively. Carly Tozer et al.’ s paper ' The Impacts of ENSO on Australian Rainfall: what not to expect ' is the most downloaded paper in recent months and has 10 citations already.
Downloads of papers increased from around 3,000 a month two years ago to 12,000 a month in the most recent data, demonstrating the growing popularity of JSHESS.
JSHESS is on a steep upward trajectory of influence— if you’ ve got some interesting work that would fit in the Journal’ s scope, the editors would love to hear from you.
JSHESS cover. Credit: CSIRO Publishing