William R. Cotton

William R. Cotton is a cloud physicist and meteorology professor emeritus at Colorado State University. He has been involved in observation and computer simulations of thunderstorms and cumulus clouds and developed one of the U.S.'s first comprehensive mesoscale weather forecast models, called the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System, or RAMS. Cotton has had positions with NOAA's Experimental Meteorological Laboratory and the U.S. Commerce Department. He has authored or co-authored four books.