Robert Henson was born in 1960 the Great Plains metropolis of Oklahoma City, tornado capital of the world. Surrounded by wild weather, he grew up fascinated by it. At the age of nine, Bob was posting outlooks on the wall of his primary school under the nom de plume “The Far-Out Forecaster.”

Bob moved south for a spell to Houston to complete a bachelor's degree at Rice University, with an interdisciplinary major in meteorology and psychology. He returned to his native state for graduate school in both meteorology and journalism at the University of Oklahoma. Through the 1980s, Bob crisscrossed the U.S. prairie as an assistant on several storm-chase research forays.  (Over the last three decades he’s seen more than 30 tornadoes, hail the size of oranges, and countless severe thunderstorms.)  For his master’s thesis in journalism, Bob studied the broadcasting of severe weather warnings on local television.

In 1987 Bob landed in Boulder, Colorado, where the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains in dramatic fashion.  Since 1989 he’s been employed as a writer and editor at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which operates the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The job has allowed him not only to indulge his interests in both meteorology and journalism but also provided a bird’s-eye perch on the evolution of research on global warming and other hot topics in atmospheric science.

When he’s not at UCAR/NCAR, Bob is often working on a freelance project. He’s the author of The Rough Guide to Weather (2002, with a second edition in 2007) and The Rough Guide to Climate Change (2006).  His first book, Television Weathercasting: A History (McFarland, 1990) remains the only comprehensive history of the field. Bob is also a contributing editor of Weatherwise magazine and was a frequent correspondent for the late and much-lamented Weather Notebook radio show.