Ross N. Hoffman is the past Vice-President of the Research and Development Division, Atmospheric Environmental Research (AER), Lexington, MA, USA, from 1999 to 2013. He is currently a part-time Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies (CISESS), University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, supporting the NOAA/NESDIS/Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR). He was a long-term member of the NASA scatterometer science teams and has served on some committees of the AMS and NAS. His Ph.D. advisor was Prof. E. N. Lorenz and post-doc advisor was Dr. E. Kalnay. His principal areas of interest are objective analysis and assimilation methods, impact experiments, atmospheric dynamics, climate theory, and atmospheric radiation.