People

Gavin Schmidt

Gavin Schmidt

Formal First Name
Gavin
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Gavin Schmidt is a climatologist, climate modeler and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and Co-founder of the award-winning climate science blog RealClimate. He works on developing and improving coupled climate models in order to understand past, present and future climate change and the impacts of multiple drivers of climate change, including solar irradiance, atmospheric chemistry, aerosols, and greenhouse gasses. Gavin is also the principal investigator on the GISS Earth System Model, which uses NASA High Performance computing facilities, and is working on improving data analytics to make the optimum use of the massive amounts of output data that this model and similar projects worldwide generate. He has worked on Education and Outreach with the American Museum of Natural History, the College de France and the New York Academy of Sciences. In addition to more than 100 published, peer-reviewed articles, Gavin is the co-author of "Climate Change: Picturing the Science" (W.W. Norton, 2009), a collaboration between climate scientists and photographers.

Professional Experience


Academic History

REALCLIMATE.ORG

  • RealClimate.org has become the website on climate science that specialists and non-specialists alike have learned to rely upon.

  • This website has become the "go-to" resource for informed, factual, and often entertaining summaries of current climate science issues.

  • It consists of weekly plain-language articles contributed by Schmidt and other scientists, each followed by hundreds of comments from the online community.

  • RealClimate has had over 15 million hits since 2004, with 27 million page views (or about 5000 visitors per day on average). 

  • Its articles have been translated into 12 other languages by native-language climate scientists.


RESEARCH

  • GISS ModelE development

  • Coupled climate modeling

  • Paleoclimate

  • Detection and attribution of Climate change


HONORS & RECOGNITIONS

  • Honorary Doctor of Science, Bristol University, UK (2018)

  • AGU Fellow (2018)

  • Honorary Doctor of Science, Williams College, MA (2017)

  • AAAS Fellow (2017)

  • Outstanding Leadership Medal (2017)

  • AGU Stephen Schneider Lecturer (2013)

  • AGU Climate Communications Prize (2011)

  • EarthSky Science Communicator of the Year (2011)