People & Sponsors

Sponsorship

The Climate Data Guide is a community project of the Climate Analysis Section, within the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory (CGD) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The project was initiated under a competitively selected grant (1048899) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). A supplemental award to UCAR's cooperative agreement with the NSF supported the rebuilding and expansion of the website during 2020-2023.

Director

Dr. Nathan Lenssen is the director of the Climate Data Guide and a Project Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at NCAR. He oversees the curation of the Guide including the addition of new datasets and analyses, communicating with and growing the Network of Experts, and chairing the Board of Advisors. He is also an Assistant Teaching Professor of Data Science at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO. 

Principal Investigator

Dr. Clara Deser is the lead principal investigator of the project. She is a Senior Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at NSF NCAR, and co-leads a number of community projects in addition to the Climate Data Guide, including the CESM1 and CESM2 Large Ensembles and the Climate Variability Diagnostics Package. An elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, Deser studies global climate variability and climate change in observations and models, with an emphasis on interactions among the atmosphere, ocean, and sea ice.

Staff

Ryan Johnson is a software engineer in the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory at NCAR and the webmaster for the Climate Data Guide. In conjunction with the web teams at NCAR and UCAR, he makes sure this website is consistent with organizational branding and modern web standards, is highly functional, secure, and runs smoothly.

Adam Phillips is a climate and data scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at NCAR. He develops community resources like the Climate Variability Diagnostics Package. For the Climate Data Guide, he maintains many of the climate indices, including the NAO and North Pacific indices.

Founding staff and Co-Principal Investigators

Drs. Aiguo Dai, John Fasullo, James Hurrell, Kevin Trenberth and Mr. Dennis Shea were the original co-principal investigators of the project, along with Dr. Clara Deser.

Dr. David Schneider led the development and curation of the Climate Data Guide for over a decade. He helped turn it into an internationally recognized resource by continuously growing its content, audience, and Network of Experts. A former Project Scientist in the Climate Analysis section at NSF NCAR, he is currently in CIRES at the University of Colorado - Boulder.

Mr. Dennis Shea, retired, was an Associate Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section. Dennis developed much of the content for the Climate Data Guide, especially that related to dataset assessment, creation, processing and visualization. In addition to his work on the Climate Data Guide, Dennis was a core contributor to the NCAR Command Language NCL.