Cliff Mass went to Cornell University for his undergraduate education where he majored in physics. During that time we worked with Astronomer Carl Sagan on a model of the Martian atmosphere and was active in the Cornell University Senate After Cornell he entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. During the first few summers he worked with climatologist Stephen Schneider on the influence of volcanic eruptions, solar variations, and  on climate. Although his Ph.D. was on African wave disturbances, the forerunners of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic, he caught the Northwest weather bug as a graduate student and began gathering information on the Puget Sound convergence zone and other local weather features Leaving the , he joined the faculty of the Meteorology Department at the University of Maryland, where he taught synoptic meteorology and weather prediction and worked on a variety of research topics, from Northwest weather circulations and high-resolution modeling, to the climatic implications of the Mount St. Helens eruption When an opening became available at the University of Washington, he moved back to Seattle as an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences.