After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, Dr. King joined NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in January 1978 as a physical scientist, where he served as Project Scientist of the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment from 1983-1992 and Senior Project Scientist of NASA’s Earth Observing System from 1992 to 2008. After retiring, he joined LASP as a Senior Research Scientist.

King’s research experience includes conceiving, developing, and operating multispectral scanning radiometers from a number of aircraft platforms in field campaigns ranging from arctic stratus clouds to smoke from the Kuwait oil fires and biomass burning in Brazil and Africa. He has also developed inversion algorithms for deriving aerosol size distribution and refractive index from ground-based sun/sky radiometers.

Dr. King is Team Leader of the MODIS science team on the Terra and Aqua satellites. As a team member, he also led the development of 5 science algorithms run routinely to process MODIS data, including the algorithm for determining cloud optical thickness and effective particle radius of both liquid water and ice clouds.

He has authored over 100 papers published in refereed scientific journals, in addition to editing 1 Book (Our Changing Planet: The View from Space), 5 Scientific Documents, and 26 book chapters.