Dr. Ellsworth J Welton

Founder, Managing Member

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Dr. Welton received a B.S. in Physics in 1993 from Jacksonville University, an M.S. in Physics in 1996 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1998 from the University of Miami. He served at the Laboratory for Atmospheres at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from 1999 to 2025. He received numerous awards during his civil service career, including: the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, the NASA Goddard Honor Award for Leadership, several group achievement awards, and two NRL Alan Berman Research Publication Awards.

He is now the Founder and Managing Member for Level One Data, LLC. Dr. Welton also has a Visiting Scientist position at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Dr. Welton has specialized in aerosol related research since 1994, particularly characterization of the optical and physical properties of various aerosol species. In addition, he is an expert in the use of lidar and radiometry to retrieve aerosol and cloud properties. During graduate school he ran a small network of radiometers in the Caribbean as part of the Aerosol/Ocean Chemistry Experiment (AEROCE). He later became one of the first site operators in the global NASA Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET), and continues a strong collaboration with them to this day. He has been active in lidar research since 1996, and is a co-founder of the NASA Micro Pulse Lidar Network (MPLNET) – a federated network of lidar sites around the world running continuously since 2000. He served as the MPLNET Principal Investigator/Project Head from 2002 to 2025.

Dr. Welton has been involved in numerous international field campaigns and co-led the development of several international research initiatives. Dr. Welton has also participated in NASA satellite missions as: atmospheric team member on NASA’s Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS), the Deputy Project Scientist for NASA's Glory mission, the former Project Scientist on the ISS Cloud-Aerosol Transport System - CATS (2011-2013), and was a science team member for the NASA CALIPSO lidar mission. Finally, Dr. Welton was a member of the science working group formulating the Aerosols, Clouds, and Ecosystems (ACE) mission (later renamed AOS) which was recommended in the 2007 NRC Earth Sciences Decadal report for NASA.

Dr. Welton has served on numerous teams at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Since 2007 he has been a member of the WMO Global Atmospheric Watch (GAW) Aerosol Lidar Observation Network (GALION), and since 2014 he as been the GALION co-chair. Dr. Welton has been a member of the WMO expert team on Atmospheric Composition Data Management (ET-ACDM) since 2016, an international group responsible for providing guidance on best practices and processes for data management within WMO. He has also served on the WMO Sand and Dust Storm Warning and Advisory System Pan-American Regional Steering Committee since 2017. In addition, he is active with other international organizations providing standards and developing improvements for operational aerosol forecasting: such as the WMO Vegetative Fire and Smoke Pollution Warning and Advisory System and the International Cooperative for Aerosol Prediction (ICAP) since 2010. In 2023, Dr. Welton served on the advisory group for the WMO Task Team on Tiered Networks.

Dr. Welton has dedicated his career to providing the global scientific community with high quality observed data products and collaborated on countless international research and application projects. He has authored and co-authored over 100 peer reviewed publications and given numerous conference and workshop presentations. His H-Index is currently 47, demonstrating his strong commitment to observable driven science. In addition to developing and running his own Earth science networks, Dr. Welton has strong collaborations with other networks across the globe through his leadership of WMO GALION (a network of networks), the WMO contributing network program, related networks such as AERONET and the Pandonia Global Network (PGN), and others.

Dr. Welton has decades of experience developing and managing data plans and data centers for large scale networks. This includes establishing secure internet based telemetry systems capable of near-real time raw data delivery from field sites to the data center, and automated processing infrastructure to serve data to the user community within an hour. He also led implementation of long-term data archives, metadata systems, and data delivery processes. These include front-end metadata and data web display and file delivery, and automated APIs for machine-2-machine interoperability. Dr. Welton has years of experience with several data and metadata formats (netcdf, hdf, various ascii formats, JSON, etc) and standards (CF, GEOMS, WIGOS, I-Adopt, GCMD, WIS/WIS2, etc) used widely in the community. In addition, he is familiar with FAIR and Open data practices and their implementation. Dr. Welton has experience with on-site and cloud data center infrastructure, including hybrid configurations. He is proficient in numerous languages (bash, python, Django, IDL, javascript, react, html, SQL programming, C ...) and operating systems (linux, Mac OS, Windows). He has several years of experience developing, implementing, and managing AWS data centers, including both full stack and dev/ops roles (EC2, S3, Cognito, IAM, Route 53, Load Balancing, VPC, Amplify, Cloudfront, Workmail, CodeArtifact, and more).