Remote sensing of atmospheric aerosol and clouds is a hot topic of modern atmospheric research. Recent results in this area have been presented at the EGU-2012 session on remote sensing of aerosol and clouds. During the session it was decided to put forward a special issue of AMT aimed at the development of modern remote-sensing techniques used for the determination of vertical structure and microphysical properties of aerosol media and clouds. In particular, the following aspects will be studied in the special issue: (1) cloud retrievals over snow; (2) cloud top height retrievals using limb observations of SCIAMACHY; (3) the errors of retrievals of cloud and aerosol properties using synthetic data sets; (4) aerosol vertical stratifications derived from IASI measurements; (5) the quality of MODIS aerosol optical thickness retrievals; (6) the investigation of non-Lambertian effects on aerosol retrievals; and (7) atmospheric aerosol properties in selected regions in Europe. We assume that this new special issue of AMT will be of importance for further advance of modern remote-sensing techniques.