His father died when he was only eight and he and his brother, Herman, were raised by his mother Bertha, a Holocaust survivor who worked as a seamstress.

[1] He retired from the GFDL and teaching in 2020, but retains an affiliation with AOS,[2] as a Senior Scholar, Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

The first is understanding how the Earth's climate responds to changes in the amount of solar radiation hitting the planet or to the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

[7] Held has continued to be concerned with how global warming can alter both the cycle of water and the distribution of winds on Earth.

In a paper published in 2006 with Brian Soden, he showed that this increase in precipitation might nonetheless be associated with a slowdown of the Walker circulation.