Roger Pielke is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and a Senior Research Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is also an Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, served as Colorado State Climatologist from 1999 to 2006, and is on the Graduate Faculty of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. As well as this book, he has authored Mesoscale Meteorological Modeling (1984 and 2002), The Hurricane (1990), Hurricanes: Their Nature and Impacts on Society (1997, co-authored with R. A. Pielke, Jr), and was co-chief editor (with R. A. Pielke, Jr) of Storms (1999). He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society and a former co-chief editor of the Journal of Atmospheric Science. Dr Pielke has published over 350 papers in peer-reviewed journals, fifty chapters in books, and has co-edited nine books.