[1] His master's degree in physics came from Guwahati University in 1971 after which he did his doctoral studies at Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) under the guidance of Bimla Buti to secure a PhD from the Gujarat University in 1976 for his thesis, Nonlinear waves in dispersive media and current driven instabilities in magnetoplasmas.

[10] After working for two years at PRL as a research associate, he moved to the US in 1978, where he did his post-doctoral studies at the laboratory of Jule Gregory Charney of Cambridge–MIT Institute during 1978–80.

In between, he had various stints abroad; he served as a senior visiting research associate at the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Interactions (1988–1989) and Institute for Global Environment and Society (1998) of University of Maryland, went on deputation to the International Centre For Science and High Technology of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) as a consultant from July to August 1992, and had three month-long assignments at the University of Princeton as a visiting research scientist, once in 1994 and twice in 1995.

[1] Goswami is known to have been the first to measure the predictability of tropical climate using coupled ocean-atmosphere system and his studies have widened the understanding of the monsoon dynamics.

[13] The principal areas of his studies have been geophysical fluid dynamics and tropical air-sea interactions and he identified a radiative-convective-dynamical feedback mechanism for generating the northward propagating 30-50 day mode, reported to be a first time find.

[4] He is also credited with the first time discovery that a convectively coupled gravest Rossby wave is responsible for the observed quasi-biweekly oscillation of monsoon and was a member of the first set of climatologists to discover the Indian Ocean Dipole along with N H Saji, P Vinayachandran and T yamagata which is a phenomenon where the temperatures alternatively oscillate between the western and eastern side of the Indian Ocean.

[9] He headed the Monsoon Mission of India project constituted by the Ministry of Earth Sciences for improving the forecast of seasonal and intra-seasonal monsoon[11] and has participated in many workshops on climatology including the Media Workshop on Climate Change organized by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in 2009.