The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory is at the heart of international scientific efforts to understand and predict the earth's climate and weather, including the impact of human activities. At GFDL, approximately 85 NOAA employees, including scientists and support staff, conduct leading-edge research on many topics of great practical value, including weather and hurricane forecasts, El Niño prediction, stratospheric ozone depletion, and global warming.

The laboratory was founded in 1955 in Washington, D.C. by Joseph Smagorinsky. In 1968, it was moved to Princeton, New Jersey, beginning a long and productive partnership with Princeton University that continues today. Over 10 GFDL scientists serve as Lecturers with tenure-equivalent academic status in the university's Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program and serve as advisors to the Program's graduate students. The interaction of GFDL and Princeton University scientists, together with a constant stream of top-quality graduate students and post-doctoral scientists, provides for an invigorating intellectual environment.

GFDL scientists maintain research collaborations with about 200 colleagues at universities and laboratories around the U.S. and the world. The laboratory has had a major influence on the international geophysical research community through such contributions as the Modular Ocean Model, the world's most widely used oceanographic modeling tool. Atmospheric radiation models that were developed at GFDL are used at other atmospheric modeling centers. A heavy focus is placed upon developing models for use by the National Weather Service in a variety of applications.

The key to the laboratory's outstanding research tradition lies in its commitment to uncompromising scientific quality. The laboratory's research program is targeted at a select group of difficult but important research problems in weather and climate. These exceedingly complex problems typically require years or decades of sustained research effort, using state-of-the-art supercomputing resources.

We invite you to explore a selection of GFDL's research, which is introduced in the pages that follow.