The RCMES Team

Dr. Duane Waliser is the Principal Investigator and Climate Science lead for RCMES.  His principle research interests lie in climate dynamics and in global atmosphere-ocean modeling, with emphasis on prediction and predictability, and model evaluation and improvement. He joined JPL in 2004 with interests in utilizing new and emerging satellite data sets to study weather and climate as well as advance our model simulation and forecast capabilities, particularly for long-range weather and short-term climate applications. Dr. Waliser is also the Chief Scientist for the Earth Science and Technology Directorate at JPL, a Visiting Associate in the Geological and Planetary Sciences Division at Caltech and an Adjunct Professor in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department at UCLA.

Dr. Huikyo Lee a data scientist. Dr. Lee’s skills in big data management, climate science, and statistics have allowed him to update RCMES and develop research collaborations internationally. Dr. Lee has led several RCMES workshops in international conferences (Lund, Sweden in 2014; Stockholm, Sweden in 2016; San Jose, Costa Rica in 2016), at California State University in 2016, and at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Climate Center (APCC) in 2014. Dr. Lee received JPL’s voyager award in recognition of his heroic efforts to advance RCMES. Dr. Lee has a Ph. D. in Atmospheric Sciences from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Alex Goodman is a data scientist. With a strong background in both software development and climate science, his roles in the development of RCMES are wide and varied, but he has particularly strong interests in data visualization, distributed computing, and software package management. He received an M.S. in Atmospheric Science from Colorado State University in 2016.

Brian Wilson is a Principal Data Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His interests include atmospheric remote sensing using GPS radio occultations, anomaly detection in climate time-series for the atmosphere and oceans, parallel computing using Apache Hadoop and Spark, hybrid cloud computing, and python.Current projects include RCMES/OCW, SciSpark for fast Earth science analytics, the Hybrid Cloud Science Data System or HySDS, and Ocean Xtremes for anomaly detection.

Dr. Paul Loikith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Portland State University in Portland, OR. Paul's research interests are at the intersection of weather and climate with emphasis on atmospheric mechanisms associated with weather and climate extremes. Paul continues to collaborate with the RCMES team and was involved in several efforts while a Caltech postdoc working on the RCMES project including CORDEX, NARCCAP, and the NASA Downscaling Project. Paul has a Ph.D. in atmospheric science from Rutgers University.

Dr. Elias Massoud is a postdoctoral researcher who joined the RCMES team to help develop a National Climate Assessment (NCA) of the Western United States water cycle. Elias attended UC Irvine (PhD’17) and UCLA (BS’11, MS’12). Elias’ research involves the fusion of data from observations and model simulations to assess and predict the state of Earth’s climate system. He joined the Regional Climate Modeling Evaluation System (RCMES) team and the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) group at JPL and Caltech, and collaborates with many scientists from different backgrounds. His specific research questions involve the Uncertainty Quantification and prediction of various Earth System processes, including groundwater, forests, and extreme storms such as atmospheric rivers.

I am currently a postdoctoral scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My research centers on better understanding how weather systems interact with geographical features to produce climate extremes (especially heat and precipitation) at local and regional scales. Sequences and combinations of variables which result in 'compounded' or 'correlated' societal risks figure prominently in my work. My projects tend to employ a variety of approaches, ranging from analysis of observational data to validation of global climate models and custom runs of regional climate models. My interests also include producing and communicating climate information such that it is maximally useful for decision-making, through contributions to impacts assessments, policies, and educational and outreach activities.

Agniv Sengupta is a postdoctoral scholar at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His interests broadly span across climate dynamics, hydroclimate variability, prediction, and predictability. A current focus of his research at JPL is on subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction of precipitation for water management in the western United States. He joined the RCMES team to study the representation of the global water cycle in climate model simulations. Agniv received his Ph.D. (2019) and M.S. (2016) in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science from the University of Maryland College Park. He was a recipient of the University of Maryland Graduate School’s Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship (2019) and the Eugene Rasmusson Graduate Fellowship of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science (2018). Agniv has also served as a student board member (2018-20) on the Climate Variability and Change Committee of the American Meteorological Society.

Dr. Adrienne M. Wootten is a Postdoctoral Research Associate for the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK. Her research work specializes in the accuracy and uncertainty associated with climate modeling and statistical downscaling, with emphasis on the use of climate projections and data in impact assessments and decision-making. She received her B.S. in Meteorology (2008) with a minor in Statistics, M.S. (2011) and Ph.D. (2016) in Atmospheric Science from North Carolina State University.

Paul Zimdars is a Senior System Administrator for the RCMES project. He has worked over 10 years on multiple JPL flight and non-flight related projects. He has extensive knowledge in Linux and Unix administration including advanced Network / Storage / and Web application troubleshooting and support.

Dr. Chris Mattmann was a founding, former co-Principal Investigator for RCMES and Data System Lead for RCMES. Mattmann was the PI for several IT advancements in RCMES funded from the NASA Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) and NASA Computational Modeling Algorithms and CyberInfrastructure (CMAC) programs. The investments funded several evolutions of the RCMED database; innovations that allow RCMES to publish information and to read information from the Earth System Grid Federation; and the new SciSpark concept for interactive analytics in RCMES. In addition these investments funded the refactoring and development of the Apache Open Climate Workbench (OCW) toolkit that powers the IT backbone of RCMES. Mattmann is now the Chief Architect in the Instrument and Science Data Systems Section at JPL and a Principal member of the technical staff; is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern Calfornia (USC); Visiting Researcher at UCLA JIFRESSE and he sits on the Board of Directors at the Apache Software Foundation. Mattmann has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from USC, and has worked at JPL for nearly 15 years.

Dr Peter Gibson is a climate scientist with a PhD from the University of New South Wales, Australia. His interest’s broadly span climate extremes and climate model evaluation. This work often involves identifying processes that drive climate extremes in the ‘real world’ (e.g. large scale circulation and land-atmosphere interactions) and evaluating their representation in climate models. Peter is also interested in novel ways to apply modern statistical tools (e.g. machine learning) to big data problems common in climate science.

Dr. Lewis J. McGibbney is a JPL Data Scientist in the Computer Science for Data Intensive Applications Group (398M) with expertise in information retrieval, Web search, databases, natural language processing and software engineering. He possesses a proven knowledge and track record in project management within the open source community and a wealth of experience working within and managing virtual teams. He is a well-recognized active member at the Apache Software Foundation one of the leading open source foundations on the globe. A committer and project lead on several high-profile projects including Apache Nutch, Gora, Any23, OODT, Open Climate Workbench, Usergrid, Tika, HTrace, CommonsRDF, Joshua and SensSoft. Dr. McGibbney has a wide spectrum of experience within international standards organizations such as the OASIS Legal Document Markup Language Technical Committee and current membership of W3C Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group and Spatial Data on the Web Working Groups where he has participated within, edited and convened numerous activities. Dr. McGibbney is an active Co-Chair of the NASA ESDSWG Search Relevance Working Group and Co-Chair of the ESIP Semantic Technologies committee.

Dr. Jinwon Kim is a Researcher in the Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering (JIFRESSE) at UCLA. Dr. Kim is an expert in the area of climate modeling, including work in multi-model ensembles and regional climate comparisons.

Paul Ramirez is a Senior Software Engineer for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he has worked on stuff related mostly to data management systems since 2001. An avid endorser of software reuse and open source that loves to explore the wonderland of search technologies and GIS. Curator of a Star Wars museum in building 171-255 (i.e. his office).

Jinny is currently an intern working on the documentation of RCMES. Her work also involves studying precipitation and surface temperature trends of CMIP5 models with observational datasets. She is currently at the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing at UC Irvine as a PhD student. Her research interests include remote sensing applications in hydrology, drought monitoring, and water storage.

Deanna is currently an intern at JPL on the RCMES Team. After completing her BA in Geography in 2014, she moved from Colorado to complete a MA in Geography at California State University Los Angeles. She is interested in large-scale climate variability, and extreme weather related to climate change, specifically atmospheric rivers. She will be joining the Climate Variations and Change (CLIVAC) Research Group at UC Santa Barbara this fall as a PhD student.