Dickinson received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966. He is presently Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He was Professor and Regents Professor at the University of Arizona from 1990-1999 and a member of the National Center for Atmospheric Research from 1968-1990, where he became Deputy Director of the Climate and Global Dynamics Division in 1981.

Dickinson has played a key role in the understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere and in establishing the influence of vegetation on climate dynamics. He has published major papers, alone and in collaboration, on land surface processes, tropical deforestation, use of satellite data for climate models, surface hydrology, climate variability and anthropogenic climate change.

Dickinson has been active in committees and working groups of the US National Research Council, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the World Climate Research Programme and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is presently co-chair of the Global Climate Project, of the Steering Scientific Committees of the US CLIVAR programme and of its Pan American panel. He was elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1988 and of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2002. He has received several honors, in particular the G. Ungen Vetlesen Prize awarded by Columbia University, the Roger Revelle Medal of the AGU and the Rossby Award of the American Meteorological Society. He is president of the AGU for 2002-2003.