Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society

About Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society

Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society — Journal Profile

Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, universally shortened to QJRMS or simply QJ, is one of the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed journals in the atmospheric sciences. It is published by Wiley on behalf of the Royal Meteorological Society, the United Kingdom's learned society for meteorology, and its own society describes it as acknowledged to be one of the world's leading meteorological publications. Its print ISSN is 0035-9009 and its online ISSN is 1477-870X, the pair recorded on this JournalsWorld record and confirmed by its OpenAlex source record, which resolves both identifiers to one and the same journal. Despite the word quarterly in its title — a survival from an earlier era of its publication history — the journal now appears eight times a year, with additional special issues, so authors and readers should not expect a four-issue annual rhythm. The name is historical; the publishing programme is modern, frequent and international.

The aims of the journal, as stated by the Royal Meteorological Society, are to communicate and to document the results of new research in the atmospheric sciences and associated fields. That short sentence carries a great deal of weight. Atmospheric science here is understood broadly: the physics and dynamics of the atmosphere, the chemistry that takes place within it, the interaction between atmosphere and ocean, the observation of weather and climate from the ground, from aircraft and from space, and the mathematical and computational machinery — above all numerical weather prediction and climate modelling — through which the atmosphere is understood and forecast. A paper belongs in this journal when it advances that understanding in a way that other atmospheric scientists will need to read, cite and build upon. Papers that merely apply a standard method to a routine local case, without a wider lesson, face a much harder path, because the journal's readership is global and its standard is set by the best work submitted from around the world.

At a Glance

• Full title: Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
• Short form: QJRMS; QJ
• Print ISSN: 0035-9009
• Online ISSN: 1477-870X
• Publisher: Wiley, publishing on behalf of the Royal Meteorological Society
• Sponsoring society: Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), United Kingdom
• Journal homepage: Wiley Online Library, as linked from the Royal Meteorological Society and from the OpenAlex source record
• First published under its present title: 1873, following a predecessor that began in 1871
• Frequency: Eight issues a year, plus additional special issues, as stated by the Royal Meteorological Society
• Language: English
• Article forms named by the society: Articles, comprehensive review articles, and comments on published papers; the journal's wider description also mentions papers, notes and correspondence presenting research results
• Open access model: Hybrid — subscription publication with an open access option; OpenAlex records the journal as not a fully open access title and lists open access article charges, discussed in the fees section below
• Directory of Open Access Journals: A DOAJ search by either ISSN returned no listing at the time of checking, which is consistent with the journal's hybrid rather than fully open access status

History and Identity

The lineage of this journal reaches back to the early 1870s, when meteorology was changing from a largely observational and descriptive pursuit into a quantitative physical science. Reference accounts of the journal record that it was established in 1871 as a bibliography of meteorological literature and took its present name, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, in 1873. The Royal Meteorological Society itself marked the journal's 150-year milestone with a digital timeline and an anniversary collection, drawing on papers chosen by former and current editors-in-chief and by the society's history group — a sign of how central the journal is to the society's identity. OpenAlex, which indexes the journal's output across its whole run, gives 1873 as its first publication year and continues to record new volumes through to the present.

That longevity matters for more than ceremonial reasons. A journal that has published continuously since the nineteenth century holds, in its back volumes, a substantial part of the primary record of atmospheric science: early upper-air observations, the development of synoptic analysis, the first mathematical treatments of atmospheric motion, the growth of numerical weather prediction from a theoretical proposal into an operational reality, and the emergence of climate dynamics as a discipline. Authors citing older work in this journal are therefore not indulging in antiquarianism; key papers in the field genuinely appeared here, and modern studies of atmospheric dynamics, predictability and modelling routinely trace their arguments back to them. The society's anniversary timeline, which gathered notable articles from across the journal's history, underlines the same point from the publisher's side.

The publishing arrangement is equally characteristic. The journal belongs to a learned society — the Royal Meteorological Society — and is published for that society by Wiley, a pattern shared by many long-established British society journals. The society connection shapes the journal's character in practical ways: Royal Meteorological Society members receive free online access to the journal, as the society states on its own journal page, and the journal sits alongside the society's other activities — meetings, professional accreditation, education and public engagement with weather and climate. At the same time, the authorship and readership are thoroughly international. Nothing in the journal's stated aims limits it to British weather, British institutions or society members, and its contents address atmospheric processes on every continent and in every ocean basin.

Publisher and Society

Wiley, through its Wiley-Blackwell publishing operation, is the publisher of record. OpenAlex names Wiley as the journal's host organisation, and the journal's homepage sits on Wiley Online Library, the platform from which current issues, accepted articles and the archive are delivered. The earlier JournalsWorld template description of this journal named its publisher only as a numbered entry with a country attached; that garbled formulation should be disregarded. The verifiable position is simple: the Royal Meteorological Society is the owning society, Wiley is the publisher, and the journal is produced in English for an international research community. Editorial decisions rest with the journal's academic editors working within that society-and-publisher structure, following the peer-review and publishing-ethics practices that Wiley applies across its research journals.

Prospective authors often ask whether society journals favour their own members. There is no statement in the material published by the society or the publisher suggesting any such preference, and the journal's stated aim — to communicate and document new research in the atmospheric sciences — is framed entirely in terms of the work itself. What the society connection does give an author is a defined community: a readership of working meteorologists, atmospheric physicists, climate scientists, oceanographers working on air–sea interaction, and specialists in forecasting and modelling, many of whom meet the journal first through the society and return to it throughout their careers.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's scope is the atmospheric sciences and associated fields, in the society's own words. Unpacking that phrase, the subject territory that the journal demonstrably covers — from its stated aims, its published contents and the topic profile assigned to it by OpenAlex — includes the following areas. First, atmospheric dynamics: the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere, waves and instabilities, convection, turbulence and boundary-layer processes, and the fluid dynamics that underpin them. OpenAlex's topic profile for the journal includes fluid dynamics and turbulent flows among its leading themes, reflecting how much of the journal's core content is, at root, geophysical fluid dynamics applied to a rotating, stratified, moist atmosphere.

Second, weather processes and forecasting: synoptic and mesoscale meteorology, precipitation processes and their measurement, severe and high-impact weather, and the science of prediction itself, including predictability studies and forecast evaluation. Precipitation measurement and analysis appears in the journal's OpenAlex topic profile, and meteorological phenomena and simulations stands as its first-listed theme. Third, numerical modelling and data assimilation: the construction, testing and improvement of numerical weather prediction and climate models, the representation of unresolved processes within them, and the assimilation of observations into model states. A journal that has published modelling research since the earliest days of the subject remains a natural home for work on model physics, resolution, ensembles and assimilation methods.

Fourth, climate variability and change: the journal's topic profile includes climate variability and models as a leading theme, and its pages carry work on the dynamics of climate, on modes of natural variability, on the response of the atmosphere to external forcing, and on the regional expression of climate change, including its effects on weather extremes. Fifth, atmospheric composition and aerosols: atmospheric aerosols and clouds form another named theme in its OpenAlex profile, covering aerosol processes, cloud microphysics and macrophysics, and the interactions between aerosols, clouds and radiation that remain one of the largest sources of uncertainty in climate science. Sixth, air–sea interaction and physical oceanography: the journal's classic scope description expressly includes physical oceanography alongside atmospheric science and applied meteorology, and OpenAlex likewise lists oceanographic and atmospheric processes among its themes, so work on the coupled ocean–atmosphere system is in scope where the atmospheric connection is real and central.

Seventh, observations and measurement: ground-based, airborne and satellite observation of the atmosphere, remote-sensing retrieval methods, and the design and interpretation of field campaigns. Applied meteorology — the use of atmospheric science in sectors such as aviation, agriculture, energy and water — also sits within the journal's historic scope description, provided the work advances general understanding rather than reporting a purely local application. Finally, comprehensive review articles that synthesise a fast-moving area, and comments that engage substantively with papers the journal has published, are named by the society as recognised contribution forms, alongside ordinary research articles and shorter items.

Editorial Practice and Peer Review

The journal is peer reviewed, and submissions are handled through the publisher's online route from the journal homepage on Wiley Online Library. Specific details that authors most often want — the current editor-in-chief's name, the full editorial board list, median times to first decision, and the journal's acceptance rate — could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, so they are stated here as not publicly disclosed in the material checked, and readers should consult the journal homepage, where Wiley maintains the current masthead and author guidelines, for the live position. That caution is deliberate: editorial teams change, and a directory profile that prints a name without a fetched source risks misleading authors for years.

What can be said reliably is structural. The journal operates within Wiley's standard research-publishing framework, which includes authorship, conflict-of-interest, data and ethics policies applied across the publisher's journals, and its article forms — articles, reviews and comments — imply the usual two-stage editorial judgement: an initial assessment of fit and significance by the handling editor, followed, for papers that pass that stage, by detailed scrutiny from independent specialists in the paper's subfield. Authors should therefore write the significance case into the paper itself, in the introduction and the discussion, rather than assuming that reviewers will supply it. In a field where many submitted papers are technically competent, the papers that prosper here are those that make clear, early and honestly, what is new, why it matters beyond the immediate case studied, and what a reader in a neighbouring subfield will take from it.

Metrics — Verified and Attributed

Journal metrics must be read with their sources attached, because different systems count different things. OpenAlex, resolving this journal through its ISSN endpoint to source S70522100 and fetched for this profile, recorded at the time of checking: 16,879 works published in the journal across its indexed run, cited a total of 553,549 times; a summary h-index of 263, meaning that on OpenAlex's counting 263 of the journal's papers have each been cited at least 263 times; an i10-index of 6,435 papers with at least ten citations; and a two-year mean citedness of about 3.42. OpenAlex also recorded recent annual volumes of the order of 260 works a year — 262 works for 2024 and 264 for 2025 in its counts-by-year data — which gives authors a realistic sense of the journal's size: a substantial but not mass-production title, publishing in the region of thirty to forty papers per issue across its eight annual issues.

These OpenAlex figures differ from the values carried in this record's older template text, which cited an h-index of 182 and an impact factor of 3.0 without a dated source. The difference is not a contradiction to be hidden; it is the normal consequence of different databases, different counting windows and different dates, and it is exactly why this profile attributes every figure. Citation-based journal indicators in the commercial systems move in the same broad territory: secondary listings fetched for this profile reported a Scopus CiteScore of 5.8 for the journal and first-quartile standing in atmospheric science in SCImago's ranking, with an SJR figure around 1.5. Readers who need a specific metric for a specific evaluation exercise — a Journal Impact Factor for a tenure file, a CiteScore for a library report — should take that figure directly from the system their institution uses, in the edition their institution specifies, rather than from any directory page, including this one. What all of the fetched systems agree on is the qualitative position: this is a long-established, heavily cited, first-quartile journal in atmospheric science, whose papers form part of the working literature of the field rather than its periphery.

Indexing and Discoverability

Secondary journal listings fetched for this profile report the journal as indexed in Scopus and in the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), the two services whose coverage matters most for authors whose institutions track publication through those systems, and its Scopus coverage is reported as running from the nineteenth-century volumes to the present — a reflection of the journal's unbroken run. OpenAlex likewise treats the journal as a core source, lists it in a number of national and international journal registers, and provides the machine-readable record through which much open bibliometric analysis of the journal is done. Its DOIs, assigned under the publisher's registration for Wiley journal articles, resolve through the standard scholarly infrastructure, and the full archive is delivered through Wiley Online Library. For librarians, the practical summary is that a subscription or society-membership route to this journal reaches one of the foundational titles of its discipline, with deep back-file value as well as current-issue value.

Fees, Open Access and Licensing

This is a hybrid journal: the normal route is subscription publication, and authors are not required to pay to publish through that route, while an open access option exists for authors whose funders or institutions require or prefer it. OpenAlex's source record lists open access article charges for the journal of USD 4,320, EUR 3,620 and GBP 2,890. Those listed amounts should be treated as a starting point for budgeting, not as a substitute for the publisher's own current price list: the charge that applies to a given article is the one stated by Wiley at acceptance for that article's licence type, and institutional agreements between Wiley and an author's university may reduce or cover the charge entirely. The older template text on this record listed a different dollar figure without a verifiable source; authors should rely on the publisher's live pages. Whether an individual article is open access also affects its reuse licence, which will be stated on the article itself — readers should always work from the licence printed on the paper they are using, rather than assuming that one article's terms apply to another.

How to Submit

Begin on the journal homepage on Wiley Online Library, which the Royal Meteorological Society links from its own publications pages and which OpenAlex gives as the journal's home. Read the current author guidelines there in full before preparing the manuscript: they govern article types and length, structure, figure and table preparation, reference style, data statements and the declarations the publisher requires. Choose the article form that matches the work — a full article for a complete research study, a comprehensive review for a genuine synthesis of a field (a form the society names expressly), or a comment where the purpose is to engage with a specific published paper. Prepare the manuscript so that its contribution is visible to a busy editor: a title that names the process or phenomenon studied, an abstract that states the finding rather than only the activity, and an introduction that places the work against the journal's own recent literature as well as the wider field.

On submission, expect the manuscript to be checked for scope and presentation before review; papers outside the atmospheric sciences and associated fields, or written without regard to the guidelines, risk being returned at that stage. If the paper goes forward, write the response to reviewers, when it comes, as carefully as the paper: answer every point, show where changes were made, and explain, with evidence, any point on which the authors respectfully maintain their position. Nothing in the fetched sources gives a verified timeline or acceptance rate for this journal, so authors working to a fixed deadline — a thesis submission, a grant end date, a tenure review — should allow the generous margin that a selective society journal warrants, and should not promise themselves or their institutions a decision date that no source has guaranteed.

Similar and Related Journals

Readers comparing venues within the Royal Meteorological Society's own family should note Weather, the society's long-running monthly magazine-journal, published by Wiley on the society's behalf since 1946, with print ISSN 0043-1656 and online ISSN 1477-8696: it serves a broader and more general meteorological readership than QJRMS and is not a substitute for it as a research outlet, but the two titles are frequently confused, and the distinction — house journal for a wide audience on one side, international research journal on the other — is the society's own publishing architecture. Within the wider atmospheric literature, authors of dynamics and modelling papers commonly weigh this journal against the American Meteorological Society's research titles, including the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, whose own lineage runs through the earlier Journal of Meteorology (1944 onwards). The choice between the British and American society flagships is usually made on readership, article tradition and the specific subfield community the authors most want to reach, rather than on any large difference in standing: both communities read both journals, and a strong paper will be found wherever it appears. What distinguishes QJRMS in that comparison is the combination of its 1873 lineage, its breadth across dynamics, modelling, observations and composition, and its eight-issue rhythm, which keeps accepted work moving into print through the year.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society a peer-reviewed journal? Yes. It is the research journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, published by Wiley, and its recognised contribution forms — articles, comprehensive reviews and comments — are subject to editorial assessment and peer review within the publisher's framework.

Why is it called quarterly when it publishes eight issues a year? The title dates from an earlier period of the journal's history; the Royal Meteorological Society states that the journal is now published eight times a year, with additional special issues. The name is retained as the journal's historic and recognised title.

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 0035-9009 and online ISSN 1477-870X. Both identifiers resolve to the same OpenAlex source record for the journal, and both appear on this JournalsWorld record.

Who publishes the journal, and who owns it? Wiley publishes the journal on behalf of the Royal Meteorological Society, the United Kingdom learned society for meteorology. The society states that its members have free online access to the journal.

Is the journal open access? It is a hybrid journal rather than a fully open access title: subscription publication is the standard route, with an open access option for individual articles. A DOAJ search by ISSN returned no listing at the time of checking. OpenAlex lists open access charges of USD 4,320, EUR 3,620 and GBP 2,890; verify the current charge for your article type with Wiley before committing.

What subjects does the journal cover? The atmospheric sciences and associated fields, in the society's words: atmospheric dynamics, weather processes and forecasting, numerical modelling and data assimilation, climate variability and change, aerosols and clouds, air–sea interaction and physical oceanography, observations, and applied meteorology with a general lesson.

How strong are the journal's citation metrics? On OpenAlex's counting at the time of checking, the journal's 16,879 indexed works had been cited 553,549 times, with a summary h-index of 263 and a two-year mean citedness of about 3.42. Secondary listings reported a Scopus CiteScore of 5.8 and first-quartile standing in atmospheric science. Always cite the specific system and edition your institution requires.

Does the journal accept review articles? Yes — comprehensive review articles are named by the society as one of the journal's contribution forms, alongside articles and comments on published papers. A review should synthesise and judge a field, not merely summarise it.

Profile Summary

Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society is a foundation title of atmospheric science: a society journal with an 1873 lineage, published eight times a year by Wiley for the Royal Meteorological Society, covering dynamics, forecasting, modelling, climate, composition and observations for a global research readership. Its verified identifiers are print ISSN 0035-9009 and online ISSN 1477-870X; its citation record, on OpenAlex's attributed counting, runs to more than half a million citations across nearly seventeen thousand works. Authors with research that advances the understanding of the atmosphere — and who can show, clearly and early, why that advance matters — will find here one of the field's defining venues. Readers should verify time-sensitive details such as editorial personnel, current charges and guideline wording on the journal homepage before acting on them, as those are the publisher's to update.