The meteorology team for the second leg of the SWERUS-C3 / ACSE Arctic cruise is shown in Photo 1, sporting snazzy windbreakers from our Swedish hosts.
While we all have slightly different responsibilities, we work closely together and help each other out with our various jobs. A cruise like this is a great opportunity to develop new skills by getting to put them into practice, and I’m very lucky to be working with such experienced, skilled (and fun) colleagues.

The leg-2 meteorology team: Ola, Dan, John, Barbara, and Georgia
As an introduction, we’ve all put together a paragraph or two about ourselves. These are below, lightly edited by me (I claim any spelling/grammar errors).
Ola –
Ola Persson is a seasoned Arctic researcher with NOAA’s ESRL/PSD/Weather and Climate Physics Branch out of Boulder, CO and team leader for the Boundary-Layer Meteorology Team. His specific interests are in the interactions between the atmosphere, ocean and sea ice along the ice edge, or marginal ice zone, including those associated with clouds, mesoscale dynamics, and ocean waves. As team leader he is responsible for making sure that our scientific interests continued to be met throughout the cruise. Ola was born in Sweden moving to the US at the age of 8, though his home in the U.S. had a very strong Swedish flavor to it. He has returned numerous times to Sweden to visit relatives and work for periods of a few months to a few years. His Arctic interests began with a summer job he had working as a field assistant at the University of Stockholm’s Tarfala glaciology station in northern Sweden, where he made surface radiation, mass balance, and runoff measurements on the glaciers. This job was arranged for him by Bert Bolin, a famous Swedish meteorologist who has given his name to the research center in Stockholm and who was a former folkdance partner of Ola’s mother. Besides being a great liaison he has provided us with some insights to the crew and things that are foreign to the rest of us.
Barbara –
Barbara Brooks is from the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and is based at the University of Leeds, UK. She has fingers in a number of instrument pies, primarily the atmospheric sounding system, LiDAR, and Radiometer, but is also helping out in the running of the Leeds flux mast and Waverider buoy. In her spare time she is also baby sitting the methane measuring system from Stockholm University that ran on the first leg. Her husband Ian Brooks [who runs this blog} was on the ‘Met Team’ for leg 1 and they managed to say hello during the crew change over in Barrow. This is the first time she’s actually sailed on ODEN: during the 2008 ASCOS project she had instrumentation deployed on the ship but spent the project flying over it in the NASA DC8 research aircraft along with Ola as part of the AMISA project.
Dan –
Dan Wolfe “Grandfather of the BAO”, though semi-retired, volunteered for this research cruise with the desire to explore a part of the Arctic he’d never seen. He first came to the Arctic in 1970 on board the U.S. Coast Guard Icebreaker Glacier as part of WEBSEC, a baseline study north of the Western Beaufort Sea prior to the Alaska pipeline. It is this adventure that encouraged him to begin a career in meteorology first with NOAA and now half-time for NOAA through the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado. He sees this as a chance to launch one more of what could be his last weather balloon in the same environment as he launched his first!!! For those of you who don’t know, BAO stands for the Boulder Atmospheric Observatory. He has been a part of this research facility and its 300m tower located near Boulder, CO since its inception in 1977 and is kiddingly referred to as the grandfather by a number of his much younger colleagues. Dan is also blogging about the cruise at http://ciresblogs.colorado.edu/icebreaker/
Georgia –
I’m a
PhD student at the Department of Meteorology, Stockholm University. I was born in Athens, Greece, I got my bachelor degree in Physics and master degree in Environmental Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. I moved to Stockholm two years ago to study the Arctic boundary layer and Arctic clouds. This is my first time in the Arctic and my first time involved in fieldwork! On Oden, I am responsible for the weather station, the temperature and humidity sensors and the sonic anemometer deployed midway up the flux mast. Launching radio soundings twice per day is my favorite task.
John –
I’m a postdoc scientist at Leeds University in the UK, working for Ian Brooks. This is my first time in the Arctic. I’ve previously been south on a hydrographic section from the Falkland Islands to the British Antarctic base Rothera, and I’m pleased to get to visit both ends of the world, though sadly not the poles (unless things on Oden go badly wrong…).
My main responsibility on this cruise is the air-sea flux mast on Oden’s bow, making use of my scientific background in directly measured air-sea fluxes. As a sort of hybrid oceanographer/meteorologist, I also deploy the Waverider buoy when conditions allow, launch the occasional radiosonde and help out Barbara and the others with their various systems.
That’s the met team – I’ve also added one of Dan’s IR camera pictures of us from the team photo shoot (Photo 2). The photos were both taken on the Oden’s helipad in a bitter wind, but I think we’ve managed to make our grimaces look like smiles.
Other blogs from the cruise, for both legs 1 and 2, can be found via the official SWERUS-C3 website: http://swerus-c3.geo.su.se

The meteorology team in infra red!