Gavin A. Schmidt

Gavin Schmidt
Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt
Nationality	British
Education	BA (Oxon); PhD (London), both in mathematics
Alma mater	Jesus College, Oxford University College London.
Occupation	Climate modeller, Climatologist
Employer	Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Website	Schmidt's homepage

Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist, climate modeler and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and co-founder of the award winning climate science blog RealClimate.

He was educated at The Corsham School, earned a BA (Hons) in mathematics at Jesus College, Oxford, and a PhD in applied mathematics at University College London. Schmidt worked on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate, using general circulation models (GCMs). He has also worked on ways to reconcile paleo-data with models. He helped develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs to improve the representation of the present day climate, while investigating their response to climate forcing.

NASA named Schmidt to head GISS in June 2014. He stepped into the position left vacant after the retirement of long-time director James E. Hansen, becoming the third person to hold the post. In an interview with Science News, Schmidt said that he wanted to continue the institute's work on climate modeling and to expand its work on climate impacts and astrobiology.

His main research interest is climate variability, both its internal and the response to climate forcing, investigated via ocean-atmosphere general circulation models. He also uses these to study palaeoclimate by working on methods to compare palaeo-data with model output. Schmidt helps to develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs (ModelE). This model has been "isotopically enabled" to carry oxygen-18 tracers, allowing the model to simulate the pattern of δ¹⁸O observed in ice cores, cave records and ocean sediments.