Unraveling the Complexities of Climate
After 50-plus years at UMD, alum and Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Professor Rachel Pinker will retire on February 1, 2025.
Rachel Pinker has spent more than half a century at the University of Maryland unraveling the complex mysteries of Earth’s changing climate.
“I was always intrigued by how the atmosphere is working, how the climate is changing,” said Pinker (Ph.D. ’76, meteorology). “It’s like a big puzzle, and that’s what attracted me, the complexity of the system and the need for a global perspective.”
As an atmospheric scientist, Pinker recognized early on that the changing patterns of climate are created by the interaction between the atmosphere and Earth’s surface.
“The balance in radiative fluxes from the sun and from the atmosphere reaching the surface determine the Earth’s climate,” Pinker explained. “You cannot identify changes in climate such as global warming without knowing what this balance is.”
In her Ph.D. research in the 1970s and later when she became a professor in the university’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science (AOSC), Pinker realized that our understanding of Earth’s climate could be enhanced by looking to space—her decades of cutting-edge research tapped into the remote-sensing capabilities of Earth-orbiting satellites that provide a global view.
“During my years at UMD, I have witnessed tremendous scientific advancement in atmospheric science,” Pinker said. “In the ’70s, the prediction models described only the atmosphere. By 2000, the models had improved significantly—adding features of land, small particles in the air called aerosols, the carbon cycle, Earth’s vegetation as well as atmospheric chemistry. All of these factors affect the radiation balance that determines whether the Earth is cooling or heating.”
For 50-plus years, Pinker’s commitment to advancing atmospheric science has been a critical part of every research challenge she’s taken on.
“When I started, I didn’t know if I could have an impact,” Pinker said, “but contributing to the progress that has been made in advancing capabilities for predicting and planning for the future is very important to me.”
Now, Pinker’s plan for the future is changing. After a long and successful career at UMD, she’s scheduled to retire on February 1, 2025. AOSC Chair Sumant Nigam says Pinker will definitely be missed.
“Rachel Pinker’s globally utilized flux datasets have brought significant recognition to our department,” Nigam noted. “Her groundbreaking work on radiative fluxes at the Earth's surface has greatly enhanced our understanding of atmosphere-land and atmosphere-ocean interactions. She is an internationally acclaimed researcher, and I am honored to have had her as a colleague and mentor.”
Pinker’s decades of work using satellite observations to understand radiative fluxes—the energy or heat received or released by the Earth’s surface and atmosphere—contributed to many important climate research projects, including numerous collaborations with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Other projects were guided by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the World Meteorological Organization, including the Global Energy and Water Experiment (GEWEX) and the Earth Observing System. WCRP and GEWEX selected an algorithm from Pinker’s team as the primary algorithm for deriving global long-term radiative fluxes, and she teamed up with scientists around the world to improve and evaluate climate models using satellites as the primary source of information.
When NASA and NOAA launched the Land Data Assimilation System to integrate data from ground and space observations into regional climate models and the United States was selected for the first test of the Global Precipitation Climatology Project, Pinker’s research team developed important information on radiative fluxes that helped improve regional forecasts and climate models.
“To get a detailed picture of what is happening over the whole globe, the satellite observations need to be consolidated, which is a formidable task and requires advanced computer capabilities and storage systems,” Pinker explained. “We’ve developed models that could use such observations and shared this information with the science community.”
Challenging conditions and atmospheric inspirations
For Pinker, overcoming challenges has always been a part of life.
“I was born in what was at the time Czechoslovakia, and after the war ended, we emigrated to Israel in 1949—that was the last year that the Russians let people out of the country, so we were lucky to get out,” Pinker recalled. “With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, my family felt that Israel was where we should go, even though my mother was from Chicago and we had family in the states. I was very young; it was dangerous and conditions in Israel were challenging—housing was scarce, food was rationed. Life was very difficult.”
Difficult, yes, but Pinker was determined to succeed. Inspired by an interest in science sparked during high school, she pursued her undergraduate and master’s degrees in physics with a minor in mathematics and meteorology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she and her husband studied.
After graduating, Pinker and her growing family moved to New York, where her husband pursued a Ph.D. Then, in 1972, they came to the Washington, D.C. area, where she was determined to juggle her time between raising three small children and earning her Ph.D. Pinker welcomed the opportunity to conduct her research in the Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics and work with its director, internationally acclaimed climatologist and National Medal of Science recipient Helmut E. Landsberg.
“He accepted me as a student, which I greatly appreciated because at that time women in science were few and not exactly welcomed with a red carpet,” Pinker recalled.
A self-described “late bloomer,” Pinker earned her Ph.D. in meteorology from UMD in 1976 at age 40 and stayed on as a postdoc. Then, when Landsberg retired, she was tapped to join the faculty and take over teaching Landberg’s courses and projects.
“In the years that followed, I was fortunate to collaborate with many scientists from different continents with whom I was on the same wavelength,” Pinker explained. “Many of them used information that we developed, which gave me additional connectivity.”
Collaborations and innovations
One of Pinker’s most memorable collaborations connected her with Piers Sellers, a NASA climate scientist who flew on three space shuttle missions and served as project scientist for Terra, a NASA climate monitoring satellite.
“Piers was very interested in the processes at Earth’s surface, so we collaborated, and I provided data for his first efforts to put together information that the climate modelers could use,” Pinker explained. “This was part of the International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project that was established by the United Nations Environment Programme to promote the use of satellite data to study land-atmosphere interactions. Piers understood that to move atmospheric science forward, one needs to provide a global view. Things like that inspired me to continue my work.”
In the late ’90s, Pinker’s research took her to Africa for an innovative air quality project with broad implications for the future, measuring aerosols—small airborne particles that greatly impact global climate.
“We got funded by NASA in 1997 to establish this station, the first one of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa, and it is still operational, still measuring aerosols,” Pinker explained. “The site is important because it is used to study the impact of dust and aerosols from biomass burning on climate. Now NASA has a major program known as AERONET to put together a global view of aerosols from satellites, with hundreds of observing stations around the globe.”
Throughout her career, the support Pinker received from the university and her students kept her focused and motivated.
“I was very lucky to have very good post-docs, collaborators and students who went on to be successful scientists,” Pinker said. “I was also privileged to see how the UMD campus changed both in appearance and recognition.”
Though she doesn’t have much time left before she retires, Pinker still has a long to-do list she’d like to wrap up. She’s a great-grandmother now and hopes retirement will mean more time for family—but she’s not sure her work as a scientist is over.
“I don’t think I can completely leave my work, my science. I still have some ideas,” Pinker said. “I still love what I’m doing, and I’m not sure I can ever completely stop.”
