  With the possible exception of gambling, meteorology, particularly
precipitation forecasting, may be the area with which the general public is
most familiar with probabilistic assessments of uncertainty. Despite the heavy
use of stochastic models and statistical methods in weather forecasting and
other areas of the atmospheric sciences, papers in these areas have
traditionally been somewhat uncommon in statistics journals. We see signs of
this changing in recent years and we have sought to highlight some present
research directions at the interface of statistics and the atmospheric sciences
in this special section.
