Earth and climate scientists

Daniel N. Dietz

Daniel N. Dietz (1913–1988) was a Dutch reservoir engineer who headed thermal recovery research at Shell, developed steam soak, and gave his name to the Dietz gravity tongue.

Sep 20, 2026

Daniel P. Schrag

Daniel P. Schrag, born 1966, is an American geochemist and Harvard professor known for Snowball Earth research, energy policy work, and a 2000 MacArthur Fellowship.

Daniel Sigman

Daniel M. Sigman is an American biogeochemist and Dusenbury Professor at Princeton University, known for using nitrogen isotopes in ocean microfossils to study past atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Daniel Strawn

Daniel G. Strawn is an American professor of soil and water systems at the University of Idaho who studies how contaminants and nutrients bind to and move through soils.

Dara Entekhabi

Dara Entekhabi is an MIT hydrologist who leads the science team for NASA's SMAP soil moisture satellite and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017.

Dario Alfè is an Italian computational physicist and geophysicist, Emeritus Professor at University College London, known for first-principles estimates of the temperature, composition, and conductivity of the Earth's core.

Dave Fultz

Dave Fultz (1921–2002) was an American meteorologist at the University of Chicago whose rotating dishpan experiments reproduced jet streams, long waves, and vortices in a spinning pan of water.

David A. Johnston

David A. Johnston (David Alexander Johnston) was an American volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who died monitoring the May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State.

David A. Woolhiser

David A. Woolhiser (died 2022) was an American hydrologist and USDA research hydraulic engineer known for runoff modeling on arid upland watersheds and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1990.

David A. Yuen

David A. Yuen is a computational geophysicist, based at the University of Minnesota since 1985, known for numerical modeling of mantle convection and the core–mantle boundary.

David Atlas

David Atlas (1924–2015) was an American radar meteorologist regarded as a founding figure of radar meteorology whose research influenced the design of the NEXRAD Doppler radar network.

David Bercovici

David Bercovici is a geophysicist, the Frederick William Beinecke Professor at Yale University, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, known for grain-damage theory of plate boundaries.

David Brunt

Sir David Brunt (1886–1965) was a Welsh meteorologist, Britain's first full-time professor of meteorology at Imperial College London, known for the Brunt–Väisälä frequency and the Brunt Ice Shelf.

David C. Noone

David C. Noone is an Australian-born climate physicist known for tracking the water cycle through stable water isotopes; he has held posts at Colorado Boulder, Oregon State, and Auckland.

David D. Pollard

David D. Pollard is a structural geologist and emeritus Stanford professor known for bringing continuum and fracture mechanics into the quantitative analysis of faults, joints, dikes, and veins.

David E. Sugden

David E. Sugden, also known as David Edward Sugden, is a British glaciologist at the University of Edinburgh known for research on Antarctic and Patagonian ice.

David G. Vaughan

David Glyn Vaughan, OBE (1962–2023), was a British glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey, rising to Director of Science and leading UK research on the Thwaites Glacier.

David Gallo

David Gallo is an American oceanographer who spent nearly 30 years at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and led the 2010 expedition that mapped the Titanic wreck site.

David Griggs (geophysicist)

David Tressel Griggs (1911–1974) was an American geophysicist who pioneered the experimental study of rock deformation, discovered hydrolytic weakening, and was professor of geophysics at UCLA from 1948 until his death.

David H. McNear Jr.

David H. McNear Jr. is an American soil scientist and professor at the University of Kentucky who studies the chemistry of soil around plant roots and won a 2008 PECASE award.

David Hodell

David Hodell is a British-American paleoclimatologist, Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge, known for lake-sediment evidence of drought during the Classic Maya collapse and elected a Royal Society fellow in 2024.

Sep 20, 2026

David Karl

David Karl, also known as David M. Karl, is an American microbial oceanographer at the University of Hawaiʻi who co-founded the Hawaii Ocean Time-series program in 1988.

David Keith (Canadian physicist)

David Keith is a Canadian climate scientist known for solar geoengineering research and for founding Carbon Engineering, a direct air capture company sold to Occidental Petroleum for $1.1 billion in 2023.

David L. Kohlstedt

David L. Kohlstedt is an American experimental geophysicist at the University of Minnesota whose laboratory studies of rock deformation established the physical basis for modeling mantle flow.

David M. Raup

David M. Raup (1933–2015) was an American paleontologist at the University of Chicago who made paleontology quantitative and proposed, with Sepkoski, a 26-million-year cycle of mass extinctions.

David McCollum

David L. McCollum is an energy and climate policy researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, known for integrated assessment modeling, his 2018 Nature Energy analysis of Paris Agreement investment needs, and IPCC roles.

David P. Roy

David P. Roy is a remote sensing scientist, professor at Michigan State University, and director of its Center for Global Change and Earth Observations, known for Landsat and MODIS research.

David Pollard (climate scientist)

David Pollard is a climate scientist and emeritus researcher at Pennsylvania State University, known for modeling Antarctic ice-sheet collapse and the 2016 Nature paper projecting Antarctica's contribution to future sea-level rise.

David R. Montgomery

David R. Montgomery is an American geomorphologist and MacArthur Fellow, a University of Washington professor since 1991 known for research on bedrock river incision, soil erosion, and civilizations.