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 then completed a post-doctoral associate position at University of Miami from 1998 to 1999. Dr. Welton accepted a position at the Laboratory for Atmospheres at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 1999, working in various roles until his retirement in 2026. 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.

Upon his retirement from NASA, Dr. Welton founded Level One Data, LLC and serves as the managing member. He is providing consulting services for Earth Science data projects, supporting the transformation of raw observational data to high-quality actionable products

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 (list in CV). 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 which was recommended in the 2007 NRC Earth Sciences Decadal report for NASA (an early precursor to the NASA AOS and FALCON missions).

Dr. Welton has served on several teams at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). He was a founding member of the WMO Global Atmospheric Watch (GAW) Aerosol Lidar Observation Network (GALION) in 2007, serving on the international steering committee until 2026. GALION is a global network of lidar networks, including MPLNET, EU ACTRIS, AD-Net, LALINET, and NDACC, that provide data on aerosol vertical distribution and properties. Dr. Welton served as the GALION co-chair from 2014 to 2026, and led the development of the GALION data center and network metadata with WMO in addition to representing the project internationally. Dr. Welton was a member of the WMO expert team on Atmospheric Composition Data Management (ET-ACDM) from 2016 to 2026, an international group responsible for providing guidance on best practices and processes for data management within WMO. He also served on the WMO Sand and Dust Storm Warning and Advisory System Pan-American Regional Steering Committee 2017 to 2025. In addition, he was 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).