Professional Biography
William B. Rossow is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Remote Sensing (Electrical Engineering) at The City University of New York/The City College where for 10 years he headed the Remote Sensing of Climate Group in the CUNY Remote Sensing Earth System (CREST) Institute. In the previous 28 years he was a Senior Research Scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York under James E. Hansen, where he was Head of the Earth Observations Group. His research covered cloud physics and dynamics, atmospheric general circulations, atmospheric radiative transfer and radiation budgets, satellite remote sensing of all components of Earth’s climate system, advanced analysis of climate and climate feedbacks about which he has published 222 refereed papers (plus 42 reports). As of October 2021 his Google Scholar h-index is 89 with an i10 index of 204.
Rossow holds a BA degree (Magna cum Laude) in Physics/Mathematics from Hanover College (under Richard Conklin), an MS degree in Physics from Cornell University, and a PhD in Astronomy from Cornell University (under Peter Gierasch and Carl Sagan). He had a post-doc position at Princeton University (under Gareth Williams at NOAA GFDL). His early work focused on the clouds and dynamics of the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter and he served on the Science Teams for the Pioneer Venus and Galileo (to Jupiter) space missions (with James E. Hansen, Larry Travis and Andrew A. Lacis).
His later work focused on clouds, radiation and the climate of Earth as Head of the Global Processing Center for the World Climate Research Program’s International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) from 1982 to 2015. He was a member of the Science Teams for the NASA First ISCCP Regional Experiment (FIRE Marine Stratus, Cirrus I & II, ASTEX), the European Scanner for Radiation Budget (ScaRaB) project, the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) spacecraft missions, the Japan/US Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) and the NASA CloudSat spacecraft mission. Dr. Rossow has mentored 24 PhD students, most at Columbia University (often co-mentoring with Anthony Del Genio) and the City College of New York, but some from foreign universities. His first student while at NASA GISS was George Tselioudis and his last student was Zhengzhao Johnny Luo, He has worked with 20 post-doctoral researchers, including Yuanchong Zhang, Claudia Stubenrauch and Filipe Aires from France, Farbice Papa and Ademe Mekonnen. Rossow served on several national and international committees, panels and working groups, including the Science Steering Group of GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Exchanges of the World Climate Research Program), the GEWEX Cloud System Study and the GEWEX Radiation Panel (GRP, which he chaired for 7 years). He was also a member of the team for the NASA Energy and Water Study, the NASA Modeling and Analysis Program and the Colorado State University Center for Multi-scale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes.
He continues to collaborate with colleagues at NASA GISS and GSFC, CCNY, Columbia University and Monash University (Australia) and advises the ISCCP processing group at NOAA NCEI. He is a member of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, a founding member of the Planetary Society, a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and of the American Geophysical Union. He received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 1988 and the AMS Verner E. Suomi Award in 2005.
From his days at Cornell in the early 1970s, he has been encouraged and supported by his wife, Lynne Kemen, and a host of cats (12 so far). He has retired to upstate New York in the Great Western Catskills.
