Daniel Phoenix, senior data scientist at NASA Langley Research Center

Daniel Phoenix is a Senior Data Scientist (contractor) in the Lidar Sciences Branch of the Science Directorate at NASA Langley Research Center. He earned a Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma in 2019; his dissertation focused on using numerical simulations to understand the effects of tropopause-overshooting thunderstorms on the chemical composition of the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.

After a postdoctoral position at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry, where he developed machine learning models to estimate above-ground biomass from airborne lidar-derived tree heights, Phoenix joined the Langley Mobile Ozone Lidar (LMOL) and Nowcast of Aerospace Ionizing Radiation System (NAIRAS) teams at LaRC in 2021.

His publications include work on an ozone exceedance event in southeast Virginia (2025), characterization of radiation exposure at aviation flight altitudes using NAIRAS (2024), and earlier studies on biomass estimation (2021), simulated impacts of tropopause-overshooting convection (2021), stratosphere-to-troposphere transport mechanisms (2020), aviation impacts on air quality (2019), lightning NOx effects (2018), and sensitivity of convection-driven exchange in WRF-Chem (2017).

His profile lists a M.S. in Atmospheric Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S.

Key Topics

Science, Daniel Phoenix, Nasa Langley, Lmol, Nairas, Lidar