Alexander A. Kokhanovsky graduated from the Physical Department of the Belarussian State University, Minsk, Belarus, in 1983. He has received Ph. D. degree in optical sciences from the B. I. Stepanov Institute of Physics, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Minsk, Belarus, in 1991. The PhD work was devoted to studies of light scattering properties of aerosol media and foams.
His habilitation work (Main Geophysical Observatory, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2011) was aimed at the development of new cloud and snow remote sensing techniques based on spaceborne observations. Alexander Kokhanovsky was a member of the atmospheric optics group at the Laboratory of Light Scattering Media Optics Laboratory at Institute of Physics in Minsk, Belarus (1983-2004) and the SCIAMACHY/ENVISAT satellite aerosol and cloud retrieval algorithms development team (Institute of Environmental Physics, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany, 2001-2013). He has designed aerosol and cloud remote sensing algorithms for the imaging polarimeter (3MI) on board EUMETSAT Polar System-Second Generation (EPS-SG) working at EUMETSAT in Darmstadt, Germany ( 2014-2017). Currently, his research interests are directed towards modeling light propagation and scattering in terrestrial atmosphere and surface including ice and snow. He has been employed by VITROCISET/Telespazio Belgium ( Darmstadt, Germany) from 2013 till April, 2022. He has worked as a guest researcher at Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (Mainz, Germany) from April, 2022 till March, 2023. He is employed by the GFZ Potsdam since November, 2022, where he is working with EnMAP data to retrieve snow and ice properties using hyperspectral observations, Dr.
Kokhanovsky is the author of books Light Scattering Media Optics: Problems and Solutions (Chichester: Springer-Praxis, 1999, 2001, 2004), Polarization Optics of Random Media (Berlin: Springer-Praxis, 2003), Cloud Optics (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006), Aerosol Optics (Berlin: Springer-Praxis, 2008), Foundations of Remote Sensing (Berlin: Springer, 2021, with D. Efremenko) and Snow Optics (Berlin: Springer, 2021). He published more than 350 papers in the field of environmental optics, radiative transfer, remote sensing, and light scattering.