Zuidema was born in Holland, the daughter of cultural anthropologist R. Tom Zuidema.[1] She lived in Peru from the ages of four to seven.[1] She later learned English when her father began a teaching position in Illinois.[1] She earned a B.S. in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1983.[2] She completed a M.S. in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987.[2] She earned a M.S. in physics (1989) and a M.S. in atmospheric sciences (1993) from the University of Washington.[2] Zuidema received a Ph.D. in atmospheric planetary and atmospheric science from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1999.[2]
Zuimeda was first exposure to atmospheric sciences at age 29 when she encountered Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility (ARM) data sets through her doctoral research.[2] Thereafter I worked on the multi-angle imaging spectroradiometer (MISR) satellite project and at the Environmental Technology Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado Environmental Technology Lab in Boulder on Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA) data.[2] Arriving at the University of Miami (UM) in 2005, she worked on Atlantic trade wind cumulus clouds and participated in the VAMOS Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Study.[2] She has focused on the biomass-burning aerosol and stratocumulus regime of the southeast Atlantic.[2] She is active on the Atlantic panel of CLIVAR and is an associate editor for Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.[2] Zuimeda is a professor and chair of the department of atmospheric sciences at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.[3]
Zumidema researches the characterization and understanding of cloud processes and cloud radiative impacts.[2] This includes aerosol-cloud interactions, cloud mesoscale organization, and their variability at various time scales.[2] She examines marine clouds, both low-latitude stratocumulus and cumulus, arctic mixed-phase, and tropical deep convection.[2] Primarily an observationalist, she connects observations to modeling studies.[2] She was a principal investigator for the Layered Atlantic Smoke Interactions with Smoke (LASIC) campaign on Ascension Island from 2016 to 2017.[2] In 2024, she was elected a fellow of the American Meteorological Society.[4]
