The book is lucid yet intuitive, keen and incisive, yet written with candor, even bordering on irreverence. But it's the healthy irreverence, call it intellectual skepticism, that drives science. The authors relish dismantling common misperceptions, they gladly acknowledge how their own thinking has evolved, and they point out where open questions remain.
Craig Bohren's degrees are in mechanical engineering, nuclear engineering, and physics. He was the first Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State. Within two years after arriving he received the Matthew J. and Anne C. Wilson Outstanding Teaching Award of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. He wrote two popular level books, Clouds in a Glass of Beer , which received the first Louis J. Battan Award for Authors, American Meteorological Society (1989) and What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks? His 1983 book with Donald Huffman, Absorption and Scattering of Light by Small Particles has been cited more than 30,000 times. He retired in 2000 but did not stop working. Fundamentals of Atmospheric Radiation (with Eugene Clothiaux) was published in 2006 and since 2012 he has been the book review editor for American Journal of Physics.
Bruce Albrecht received his Ph.D. from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University. He was a teacher and researcher in the Department of Meteorology at Penn State University (1977-1995) and in the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami (1996-2013). His key scientific contributions include work on the trade-wind boundary layer, marine stratocumulus clouds, cloud-aerosol-precipitation interactions, and cloud radar observations. His 1989 Science paper Aerosols, Cloud Microphysics, and Fractional Cloudiness has received over 4000 citations. He was the recipient of the American Meteorological Society Teaching Excellence Award in 2013 and was an editor of the Monthly Weather Review (1985-1990) and the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences (2008-2011).