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Gavin Schmidt

Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist, climate modeler and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. He has 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. The latest GISS GCM is called ModelE.He is the co-author, with Joshua Wolfe, of Climate Change: Picturing the Science (2009), which has a foreword by Jeffrey D. Sachs. The book combines images of the effects of climate change with scientific explanations.In October 2011, the American Geophysical Union announced that Schmidt was to be awarded its inaugural Climate Communications Prize for his work on communicating climate-change issues to the public. The award is to be presented at the AGU's Fall Meeting in December. The award news release noted his outreach work including co-founding and contributing to the RealClimate blog.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.