George has been the recipient of eight Outstanding Publication Awards and a Gold Medal of the Department of Commerce. He was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 1977, and presented the Nicolet Lecture of AGU in 2001. He served AGU as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Geophysical Research (Space Physics) from 1973 to 1977, and as Member and Chair of the AGU Publications Committee during the initial and difficult phase of the transition from print to online publication. He spent six years as a member of the AGU Budget and Finance Committee, and was elected President of the Solar-Planetary Relations Section of AGU in 1982.
He was a member of the American Meteorological Society, and served as a member of their Council from 1979 to 1982. He was also appointed as a member of the Editorial Board of the AMS's Glossary of Meteorology in 2001.
He has been a member of many Committees of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation, and has been Chair of the Advisory Committee for the Arecibo Radio Telescope facility.
Internationally he has been a member and Chair of the Fachbeirat (Advisory Committee) for the Max-Planck Institut fur Aeronomie in Lindau, Germany, a member of the Network for Space Research Evaluation of the government of Canada, and the Space Science Evaluation Committee of the government of Norway.