Cecilie Mauritzen, project Leader, met.no
Cecilie Mauritzen is an oceanographer who specializes in large-scale ocean circulation and its role in earth's climate. She is an observationalist by nature, and looks forward to many sea-going adventures during the International Polar Year. Her PhD is from the MIT/Woods Hole Joint Program (in 1994), and she has since worked as an oceanographer in the USA, in France, and for the last five years: at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.
Edmond Hansen, project co-leader, NPI
Edmonds scientific interest is focused on the Arctic freshwater budget, with emphasis on the export of sea ice and liquid freshwater through Fram Strait. Under iAOOS-Norway this work is taken one step further through wintertime cruises and by extending the freshwater monitoring instrumentation in Fram Strait. After work freshwater is best for fishing. A major interest is fishing at sea and in mountain lakes. The old but faithful fishing boat "Kvitnos" is frequently accompanying Edmond around in the archipelago of Northern Norway.
Marit Reigstad, NFH
Marit Reigstad is a marine biologist with interest for carbon cycling. She has focused on vertical export of carbon and regulating mechanisms involved through physical environment and the lower trophic levels of the food web. She has her PhD from the University of Tromsø on dynamics of plankton communities and vertical export in sub-Arctic fjords in 2000, and since then moved focus north to the Barents Sea, Arctic Ocean and the Fram Strait. She is employd as a researcher at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science,University of Tromsø.
Frank Nilsen, UNIS
Frank achieved his PhD in oceanography in 2001 at the University of Bergen, whick is his home town, when he defended his thesis at the Geophysical Institute. The topic of his thesis was currents and horizontal eddies trapped over sloping sea floor, which he continued to study in his following research, and is the reason for being a partner in iAOOS-Norway - with research focus on the West Spitsbergen Current along the West Spitsbergen Slope. Frank is an Associate Professor at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) and have held this position since 2001. He says he really enjoys living in Longyearbyen and Svalbard, were opportunities for great outdoor adventures are many, especially together with his three Alaskan Malamutes.
Harald Schyberg, met.no
Harald works in the Research and Development Division, Section for Remote Sensing - in the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. His fields of expertise are dynamical meteorology; satellite measurements of atmosphere and sea ice; mathematical and statistical methods; data assimilation.
Vigdis Tverberg
Employed as a project researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute, currently on the NFR project MariClim. And will be working in iAOOS in 2009 and 2010 as leader of Task 3.4 and 3.10, focusing on process experiments related to the mixing of Arctic and Atlantic water masses.
JoeLaCasce, Project Leader, Poleward, UniO
Joe did his degree in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in physical oceanography and his post-doc at IFREMER in France, studying Lagrangian statistics. He then worked for four years at the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution. In 2002 he moved to Norway and started working at met.no.
He is now a professor of dynamical meteorology at UiO, and the project manager of POLEWARD - a Lagrangian-based oceanographic experiment, meaning that it will center around free-drifting buoys rather than fixed measurement sites. The main goal is to measure directly how the warm water flowing in from the North Atlantic mixes laterally offshore, into the Nordic Seas.
Ingunn Burud, met.no
Ingunn will be working on work package 2: Operational ocean and sea ice monitoring and forecasting system. In particular working on assimilation of ocean and sea ice data into the numerical ocean model in order to improve its initial conditions and hence the forecast.
The plan is to assimilate both existant data from satellites (sea surface temperature and sea ice drift) and new in situ data obtained during the polar year period (buoys and gliders).
Christian W. Riser, NFH
Christian Wexels Riser defended his PhD in marine biology at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science, University of Tromsø in January 2007. In his thesis he studied the importance of mesozooplankton on vertical flux regulation in marine ecosystems with special emphasis on the Barents Sea. He has a post-doc position within iAOOS-Norway, where he will contribute to enhanced knowledge of carbon cycling in arctic marine food food-webs and how how it might be effected by climate change.
