Jackson School of Geosciences. In Austin, Texas. A quiet person, like a saint. Wet to Harvard for his undergraduate degree. Completed his graduate studies from MIT. A pioneer scientist still teaching in his 80’s.

He never said no to his students. He never disagreed with his students. He would just listen to the presenter and provide his comments in the end in his low voice. One had to listen very carefully to understand what he would say. He would always give a big advice in a simple language.

Dr. Robert Dickinson is one of the greatest scientist in the field of climate modeling. His papers have received more than 50,000 citations to date. I was fortunate enough to have him in my PhD qualifying and defense examination committee. My PhD supervisor Zong-Liang Yang was once supervised by him. So he is like my grandfather in the research world.

A picture taken after my PhD defense on April 15, 2016. Dr. Dickinson is at the right end.

In my PhD qualifying exam, he didn’t give me any comments. He only said — build on the existing knowledge, than create something entirely new. He was basically saying that — do your research standing on the shoulders of giants. It was a very important suggestion to me because at that time I was trying to propose/develop a new map to characterize dust sources that could be used in climate models. And at that time, I didn’t really know how challenging it could be. I just wanted to talk ‘big’ because I had to do it to continue my PhD. It was indeed my ignorance, fueled somewhat by my ego. His advice immediately brought me down, to the ground.

He received his PhD in 1966. He then worked at NCAR for more than 20 years. In the late 70’s he noticed that the ‘land’ part of the global climate models were the worst. It was indeed true because at that time, climate models mainly focused on large-scale atmospheric circulations such as Hadley cells. They overlooked the importance of land perhaps because more than 70% of Earth’s surface is ocean and assumed that land would have little role on modifying the atmosphere.

But he thought it was not right. Land was indeed important and it was not right to ignore it from the equations of the Earth System. Is there no role of land vegetation on the atmospheric dynamics? What about the role of aerosols that originate from lands? Well, we humans live on lands so without representing it how would anything be complete?

So he started working on improving the land component of the climate models. He is particularly known for the land model that he developed called BATS (Biosphere atmosphere transfer scheme) in which he modeled how biosphere exchanges energy with the atmosphere.

If you look at the history of most creative scientists, you will see that they all have several single-author papers. No wonder, Dr. Dickinson has many such articles which you can find in his Google Scholar page. In one of his single-authored articles, the abstract consists of only 2 sentences. I have never seen any abstract shorter than that. That shows, how straight he was to the point.

Yesterday, I read one of his paper that he published in 1983, while I was reviewing the literature on ‘surface albedo’ characterization in climate models. Apparently, I was 1 year old at that time. In that paper, he goes into so much details about the importance and complexity of representing surface albedo in climate models. And that is why I am writing about him today.