Letter from the editor

Atmosfera, founded by Dr. Julian Adem, pioneer of the atmospheric sciences in Mexico, began almost as a one-man venture 25 years ago (on April 1, 1988), publishing four articles per issue. Very soon after the first number it was clear that the journal needed a formal editorial staff that would contribute to its quality and continuity. Atmosfera was included in Science Citation Index in the year 2000 and we began publishing six-article issues in 2006. With the present issue, and as a result of the growing interest of scientists around the world, we launch the publication of eight articles per number, feat that is a source of great satisfaction for both the Editorial Board of the journal and the editorial staff.

Atmosfera will be celebrating its 25th anniversary starting on April 2013. For this occasion and until April 2014 we will be first publishing a thematic issue (Atmosfera 26-2) and then a series of revision articles that will be included in our regular numbers. The thematic issue, prepared by our former Editor Dr. Graciela B. Raga, will include eight articles, five referring to tropical cyclones in the eastern Pacific Ocean and three concerning Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. The revision articles are being prepared by well-known authors on their areas of expertise, focused on tropical regions and mid-latitudes.

In the present issue we include articles from Argentina, India, Mexico, Spain and Turkey which cover important local and/or regional issues: the variability in mean and extreme precipitation in Argentina using long-term monthly time series data from 1860 to 2006 (B. Scian and J. Pierini); the determination of weather types for the western Mediterranean basin from 1948 through 2009, according to the Jenkinson-Collison method (M. Grimalt et al.); a synoptic climatological approach to the investigation of links between air-mass types and hospital admissions for respiratory diseases in Spain during the period 2000-2006 (F. de Pablo Dávila et al.); a procedure to generate synthetic storms which preserves the statistical characteristics of historical daily precipitations in the Mexico City basin (R. Domínguez-Mora et al.); the use of physiologically equivalent temperature to compare the effects of elevation-dependent environmental and atmospheric conditions on thermal and bioclimatic parameters in two neighboring Turkish cities with marked differences in altitude (O. Çaliskan et al.); the results of photooxidation experiments performed in the European Photorreactor to study the formation of secondary organic aerosols (M. G. Vivanco et al.); the effects of using US-EPA MOVES2010a model for estimating PM2.5 emission factors in the Mexican vehicle fleet, instead of the MOBILE6.2-Mexico model used in the 2005 Mexican National Emissions Inventory; and the study of near-surface boundary layer characteristics through the vertical variation of fluxes of heat, moisture, momentum, kinetic energy and the Richardson number during the pre-monsoon season in two Indian meteorological towers (S. Chaudhuri and A. Middey).

I invite you to accompany us through this celebration with a plethora of very interesting topics.

Sincerely,

Carlos Gay
Chief Editor