This version of Hurricane Isaac — based on the force of nature that hit Louisiana in 2012 — didn’t get very far. Atmospheric Research has retracted a paper on a simulation of the hurricane just a few months after it was published.
The paper included two features that commonly get a paper retracted: erroneous data, and a dispute over authorship.
The 2014 paper only has one author: O. Alizadeh-Choobari, a climatologist at the University of Tehran.
Here’s the retraction note, which provides a few more details on what went wrong:
This article was retracted at the request of the Editor in Chief. Significant errors in the data were detected in the manuscript outlined as follows: (1) Physically flawed modeling setup, the LES run presented in the manuscript was forced by the sea surface temperature (SST) and set it to be constant throughout the simulation and (2) misleading results and inappropriate comparison. In this study, the LES domain only covers an area of roughly 22 × 22 km2, whereas the domain of mesoscale simulation covers an area of 800 × 800 km2.
Furthermore this article presents a dispute among the original research group about authorship. We would like to apologize to readers for not detecting these problems during the review process.
The paper, “Large-eddy simulation of the hurricane boundary layer: Evaluation of the planetary boundary-layer parametrizations,” explored how the energy of the hurricane changed as it moved over the ocean. It has one citation, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
We have reached out to the author of the paper, and to the editor in chief of the journal, and will update this post if we hear back.
Hat tip: Rolf Degen
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