Vol. 12, issue 10, article # 0

Abstract:

It is the thirtieth anniversary of the Institute of Atmospheric Optics. By the human standards it is the age of maturity. Even in comparison with the Russian Academy of Sciences, whose 275th anniversary was celebrated this year, our Institute is past 10 percent, what is a significant value. For this time many things in our country have changed, and the country itself has changed. A new epoch has come. But the vector of development of the Institute is always directed forward, although sometimes we had to search a way round, especially in recent years.
The Institute is called for atmospheric optics; this research field had originated in Tomsk a decade before the Institute was founded. (For the history of development of atmospheric optics and academic science in Tomsk see the first paper of this issue.) I had the fortune to participate in this process from the very beginning. Since those days the knowledge database has been formed in the Institute on a wide spectrum of problems: atmospheric spectroscopy, optics of aerosols, optics of randomly inhomogeneous media, etc.
The Tomsk school of atmospheric spectroscopy immediately gained acceptance both in Russia and abroad. So, even at the dawn of its formation the Institute successfully organized international conferences on high-resolution molecular spectroscopy first in Novosibirsk, because Tomsk was a closed city, and then in Tomsk. Some stages of development of the spectroscopic school at the Institute of Atmospheric Optics are described in the paper by Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor S.D. Tvorogov.