Her research focuses on the relationship of warm, shallow clouds to the large-scale environment, with an emphasis on the connection to radiation.

Dr. Zuidema studies cloud processes and their radiative impacts, and the relationship of clouds to their large-scale environment. Scientists still lack a guiding theory for low cloud behavior, a lack that acutely affects our ability to predict future climate. Dr. Zuidema is primarily an observationalist, but also uses a combination of observations and modeling to help articulate the low cloud response. While observations of clouds help describe what is happening, models help describe why it is happening.
For her research, Dr. Zuidema utilizes observations spanning a range of scales, from in-situ datasets provided by aircraft to surface-based remote sensing datasets to satellite datasets. She then uses data integration – combining slices of information from instruments and models – to build a bigger picture of the processes she is studying.