Chou Jifan, a meteorologist, was born in Changsha, Hunan in July 1934, and is honorary dean of the College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University. He graduated from the Physics Department of Peking University in 1956. He was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993. He is professor of Beijing Institute of Meteorology. He used to be the dean of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences of Lanzhou University, the dean of the Beijing Institute of Meteorology, and the chairman of the Entropy and Interdisciplinary Research Society. In the 1960s, variational method and functional analysis were first introduced into numerical weather forecasting, and the theories and methods proposed were nearly 10 years earlier than similar foreign work. In the 1970s, he demonstrated the equivalence between the evolution of the atmospheric temperature pressure field of the quasi-geostrophic model and the thermal condition of the underlying surface, and combined the positive and inverse problems, and proposed to reverse the atmospheric elements and parameters from historical data to make them consistent with the long-term forecast model. He used the most novel mathematical methods to reveal the overall and global behavior of the atmospheric dynamics equations and got the best results. Since the 1980s, he has studied the gradual nature of the long-term evolution of atmospheric dynamics, and obtained the nonlinear adaptation characteristics of atmospheric dynamics operators to external sources under specific conditions. This is not only of great significance for guiding long-term forecasts, but also an outstanding contribution in the research of international partial differential equations. His representative works include 'Problems of Using Past Data in Weather Numerical Forecasting' and 'Attenuation of Initial Field Action and Characteristics of Operators' and so on. In 1978, he won the National Science Conference Achievement Award. In 1989 he was awarded the National Education System Model Worker, and in 2006 he was awarded the He Liang He Li Prize in Meteorology.