Dr. Duane Waliser

Principal Investigator - Climate Science
Email: duane.e.waliser@jpl.nasa.gov

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.

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Dr. Elias Massoud

Postdoctoral Researcher Email: elias.massoud@jpl.nasa.gov

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.

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Dr. Colin Raymond

Postdoctoral Researcher Email: colin.raymond@jpl.nasa.gov

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.

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Dr. Agniv Sengupta

Postdoctoral Researcher Email: agniv.sengupta@jpl.nasa.gov

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.

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Past Team Members

Dr. Chris Mattman

Co-Principal Investigator - Data Science
Email: chris.a.mattmann@nasa.gov

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.

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Dr. Lewis J. McGibbney

RCMES Data Scientist
Email: lewis.j.mcgibbney@jpl.nasa.gov

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.

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Dr. Jinwon Kim

Regional Climate Scientist and Modeler
Email: jkim@atmos.ucla.edu

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The RCMES Team

Past Team Members

Dr. Jinwon Kim