This paper introduces a special section based on general environmental scientific problems, with a particular focus on using atmospheric data. All the papers and authors provide the methodology to study, analyze, predict, and evaluate the spatial-temporal behavior and the complicated spatial-temporal structure of the data. The overall aim is to present up-to-date developments in spatial and spatiotemporal statistics in the field of the atmosphere, to present on-going research, and to discuss important problems to be addressed in the near future.