He led six expeditions to the Hindu Kush range in Afghanistan, where he made a dozen first ascents, and had a climbing destination, Dozier Dome, in Yosemite National Park named after him.

From 1987 to 1990, he worked as a senior member of the technical staff and the Project Scientist for a potential spectroscopy space mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Dozier's research extended from detailed studies of snow hydrology to conception and implementation of remote sensing and information management systems that have facilitated developments in the broader Earth science community.

His work in the world's mountains addressed the storage and melting of snow that dominate the hydrologic cycle and have economic and social significance to the people who depend on snowmelt for their water resources.

Shortly after arriving at UC Santa Barbara in 1974, he appreciated that remote sensing from satellites would be the key to measuring snow properties and the energy balance that determines the rates of melting and sublimation, particularly over extensive, inaccessible terrains.

His approaches took the view that the information from these satellites would best be interpreted through a rigorous examination of the physics of the sensors, and how the radiation they record interacts with the atmosphere, the ice crystals and liquid water in the snow pack, and the surrounding terrain.

Thus, Dozier's research has extended from ground-level studies of energy balance processes to laboratory and field techniques for measuring snow properties, to remote sensing, spatial modeling, and what has become known as environmental informatics.

The image had been captured by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument on the NOAA-6 satellite, and the spots, they discovered, were campfire-sized flares caused by the burning of methane escaping from oil wells.

Dozier continued work in this area for several years studying thermal infrared remote sensing and how to calculate land surface temperature from space.