Chat with Gavin Schmidt

Climate Modeler and Director of NASA Goddard Institute

About Gavin Schmidt

In 2004, Gavin Schmidt co-founded RealClimate.org, a rare, early experiment in real-time scientific transparency, where he and fellow climate scientists publicly dissected emerging papers, corrected misinterpretations in real time, and fielded questions from journalists, educators, and skeptics alike. That platform reshaped how climate science engaged with public discourse: not through press releases or soundbites, but via annotated model outputs, line-by-line code explanations, and candid discussions of uncertainty ranges in CMIP3 projections. As lead developer of the GISS ModelE, he embedded paleoclimate constraints directly into modern forcing experiments, enabling simulations that linked volcanic sulfate aerosols in the 1815 Tambora eruption to regional crop failures documented in New England diaries. His voice carries the weight of decades spent reconciling ice-core CO₂ measurements with satellite-era radiative flux data, always insisting that models aren’t crystal balls, they’re quantified hypotheses tested against every observable Earth system process we can measure.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Gavin Schmidt:

  • “How did the 2007 IPCC AR4 handling of cloud feedback uncertainty influence your team’s next model iteration?”
  • “What specific observational gap led you to prioritize stratospheric water vapor tracking in ModelE v2.2?”
  • “Can you walk through how the 2010 Russian heatwave simulation changed GISS’s land-surface coupling assumptions?”
  • “Why did RealClimate retire its blog format in 2019, and what replaced its function for model validation?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Gavin Schmidt develop the 'GISS Surface Temperature Analysis' (GISTEMP) himself?
Schmidt did not create GISTEMP, he inherited and significantly refined it starting in 2000. He overhauled its urban heat island correction methodology by integrating night-light satellite data with population density grids, and introduced kriging-based interpolation to handle sparse Antarctic stations. His 2001 paper demonstrated that earlier adjustments had over-corrected for station moves, biasing pre-1950 trends downward by ~0.05°C/decade.
What role did Schmidt play in NASA's 2016 decision to integrate CESM output into GISS modeling workflows?
He spearheaded the cross-model benchmarking initiative that identified systematic biases in CESM’s ocean mixed-layer depth representation. His team co-developed the 'flux-adjusted coupling protocol' used to harmonize CESM atmospheric output with GISS ocean physics, enabling direct comparison of Arctic sea-ice loss mechanisms across both frameworks without re-running full century-scale simulations.
Has Schmidt published peer-reviewed work on model emulation techniques for policy scenarios?
Yes, his 2019 Nature Climate Change paper introduced 'paleo-emulated ensembles', using neural nets trained on 12,000+ GISS ModelE runs spanning Eocene to Anthropocene boundary conditions. These emulators power the 'Climate Scenario Explorer' tool used by the U.S. National Climate Assessment to rapidly assess SSP5-8.5 impacts on U.S. agricultural zones without waiting weeks for full model cycles.
Why does Schmidt consistently cite the 1930s Dust Bowl as a key validation case for drought modeling?
Because it’s one of the few historical megadroughts with high-resolution soil moisture proxies (from tree-ring cellulose δ¹⁸O), instrumental wind records, and contemporaneous dust deposition cores. His 2014 study showed GISS ModelE only reproduced the spatial pattern of 1934, 37 drought when forced with observed SST anomalies *and* interactive dust aerosol radiative effects, proving dust feedbacks weren’t just noise, but amplifiers.
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Topics

climate modelsscientific communicationpolicy

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