9:26 a.m., April 22, 2010----A paper with Lian-Ping Wang, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Delaware, as the leading author has recently been recognized by Elsevier Publisher as one of the 50 most-cited articles published in Atmospheric Research from 2006 to 2010. This recognition will be announced on May 4 in Vienna, Austria, during the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2010.

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This places the paper, in terms of the number of citations, among the top five percent of papers published in the journal during that five-year period.

Atmospheric Research is a European journal that publishes scientific papers dealing with all atmospheric processes extending from the earth's surface to the tropopause -- the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere -- with special emphasis on the physics of clouds and precipitation, cloud dynamics and thermodynamics, numerical simulation of cloud processes, clouds and radiation, meso- and macrostructure of clouds and cloud systems, and weather modification.

The recognized paper, “Effects of Stochastic Coalescence and Air Turbulence on the Size Distribution of Cloud Droplets,” was co-authored with Wang's previous doctoral students Orlando Ayala and Yan Xue, and his collaborator Wojciech Grabowski of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

Another paper from Wang's group, “Theoretical Formulation of Collision Rate and Collision Efficiency of Hydrodynamically Interacting Cloud Droplets in Turbulent Atmosphere,” published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences (JAS) in 2005, is ranked 28th among the 1,315 papers published in JAS between 2005 and 2010. JAS is widely recognized as the best journal in the atmospheric sciences.

Trained in engineering fluid mechanics, Wang began publishing the results from interdisciplinary research focusing on turbulent collision of cloud droplets and its impact on the warm rain processes in 2005 in atmospheric science journals.

“I am very pleased to see that our recent papers are having a significant impact,” he says. “A parameterization of turbulent collision of cloud droplets we published in 2008 is now being used by several research groups to include the effects of cloud turbulence in weather and climate modeling, including Al Cooper and collaborators at NCAR, Thanos Nenes's group at George Tech, and Bjorn Stevens's group in Germany.”

Wang has been invited to give talks and lectures at three recent, high-profile international workshops and schools: Workshop on Physics of Climate Change, held at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, UC Santa Barbara in July 2008; International School and Workshop on Dynamics of Inertial Particles: From Ocean and Atmosphere to Planets, held at the Max Planck Institute of Physics and Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, in September 2008; and The 4th Turbulence Workshop on Clouds and Turbulence, held at Imperial College London in March 2009.

Wang will also deliver a set of lectures on numerical studies of turbulent collisions at the International School on Fluctuations and Turbulence in the Microphysics and Dynamics of Clouds, to be held in Porquerolles, France, from August 30 to September 10, 2010.

“It takes time to venture into interdisciplinary research, but it can be very rewarding in the end,” Wang says.