Dr. Ricardo Todling works for the NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO; former Data Assimilation Office, DAO). He started at NASA/DAO under a National Research Council fellowship in 1992, followed by a fellowship from the Universities Space Research Association in 1994, and subsequently joined Science Applications International Corporation as a contractor working for NASA's DAO and GMAO. In 2009, Dr. Todling was hired as a civil servant working for NASA/GMAO as Research Meteorologist.
Since 1996, Dr. Todling has been directly involved in developments associated with the DAO and GMAO data assimilation systems. He is one of the primary developers of the first NASA/DAO near-real-time data assimilation system built to support NASA's Earth Observing System program in the late 1990's and beyond. Since then, he has been in the role of Leading the data assimilation development in the Goddard Earth Observing System. This system provides data for NASA Instrument Teams to validate and calibrate their products as well as supports Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications efforts. Dr. Todling has served as liaison between GMAO and NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction since the initial days of GMAO. He has directly contributed to the development of the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation analysis system; this is the system supporting data assimilation efforts at GMAO, NCEP and their Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation partners. More recently, Dr. Todling has led the development and implementation of the GMAO Hybrid four-dimensional Ensemble-Variational Data Assimilation System. Dr. Todling has also been the lead developer of the GMAO adjoint-based tool for assessing observation impact to forecasts. More recently, Dr. Todling has been involved in testing components of JEDI, the future NASA/NOAA data assimilation system.