Project Team

Øyvind Sætra (project leader), o.satra(at)met.no

Øyvind Sætra took his PhD on wind generation of waves and effects of surface films of wave formation at the University of Oslo in 1996. He started to work as a scientist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute in the 1996. His main responsibility was the implementation of a third generation wave forecasting model (WAM) for operational use at the institute. Currently, Dr. Sætra is leading the wave forecasting group the Research Department, aiming at improvement and validation of the institutes operational wave forecasting system. From 1997 to 2000 he was project leader at the institute for the EO funded project EuroRose, where the goal was to implement a demonstrator for high resolution real-time monitoring of waves and currents. Here, real-time coastal radar observations were assimilated into an ocean model. During the period 1998-2000 Dr. Sætra was in charge of the work to develop a sea-ice model at the institute. This work was part of the Norwegian regional climate project RegClim. From 2001 to 2004 he was on secondment to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, England. At ECMWF, Dr. Saetra was working in the wave group. The main responsibility was to investigate and improve the use of ensemble forecasts for ocean waves and the use of ensemble forecasts of ship routing. During the stay at ECMWF he was also working on improved description of the air-sea momentum and energy transfer by coupling between atmosphere, waves and ocean currents. At the moment Dr. Sætra is leading two major projects at the institute on polar lows and Arctic extreme weather, IPY_THORPEX and ArcChange. Both projects are part of the International Polar Year.

Yvonne Gusdal, y.gusdal(at)met.no

Yvonne Gusdal took her Master of Science in Physical Oceanography at the University of Bergen in 2007 working with Nearshore wave forecasting and hindcasting by dynamical and statistical downscaling. Since 2008 she has been working as a scientist in the Oceanography section in the R&D division at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. She has been working with trajectory models in LEO (Long-term effects of oil accidents on the pelagic ecosystem of the Norwegian and Barents Seas) and SKAGCOD (Linking physics and biology - Structuring of cod-populations in the North Sea/ Skagerrak water-system), and has experience from model validation. M.Sc Gusdal has also been working with the ocean model ROMS.

Steinar Eastwood, s.eastwood(at)met.no

Steinar Eastwood took his Master of Science on remote sensing of precipitation from AVHRR data at the University of Oslo in 1996. Since 1997 he has been working as scientist in the Remote Sensing Section at Norwegian Meteorological Institute, and as senior scientist since 2001. Steinar Eastwood has been involved in different projects within remote sensing of surface variables, such as SST, sea ice and snow cover. During this work he has gained experience with different satellite systems, both passive and active instruments, applying both microwave and optical sensors. His main area of interest is at high latitudes and especially the Arctic. He is engaged both in the scientific and technical work at met.no, taking part in both the development of new methods and implementing new products for operational production. Steinar Eastwood started on the Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF) project for EUMETSAT in 1997, and is now project leader and software manager for High Latitude part of the the OSI SAF. He has taken part in different EU project (such as EuroClim, MERSEA and MyOcean) and projects with ESA (such as Medspiration and CryoClim). He is also involved in the Group for High Resolution SST (GHRSST), taking part in the SST validation and diurnal variability working groups.

Jens Debernard, j.debernard(at)met.no

Jens Debernard took his Ph.D. on the turbulent oceanic boundary layer beneath deformed sea ice at the University of Oslo in 2000. In 2001 he started as a senior scientist at met.no R&D Department where he now has a special focus on polar climate, regional climate modelling, and on the development and maintenance of sea ice models used for in climate and forecast applications. He has been the main developer behind the sea ice model used for coupled ice-ocean forecasts at met.no, and has also been responsible for coupling this model to several ocean circulation models. Also, he is the main developer behind the Oslo Regional Climate Model (ORCM). This model has been developed and used in several Norwegian- (RegClim) and EU-funded projects (GLIMPSE and IP-DAMOCLES). With a expert competence on physical and technical aspects of atmosphere-ice-ocean coupling, he is one out of three core members of the main development theme behind the new Norwegian Earth System Model called NorESM, with a special responsibility for maintaining and developing the sea ice component and its interaction with atmosphere and ocean. The NorESM should be ready to deliver results to the next IPCC assessment report (AR5). Also he is strongly involved in the IPY project iAOOS-Norway, with a special focus on improving the sea ice component used in the met.no sea-ice forecast system.

Pål Erik Isachsen, p.e.isachsen(at)met.no

Pål Erik Isachsen holds a M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and a Ph.D. from the University of Bergen, Norway. His M.Sc. work involved observations and theory of tidally-induced mixing in fjord while is Ph.D. work focused on analytical models of the large-scale circulation in the Nordic Seas and Arctic Ocean and on inverse models of the high-latutude oceanic overturning circulation. During post doctoral studies at the University of Oslo he worked with analytical and numerical models of baroclinic Rossby wave break-up from baroclinic instability. At the Norwegian Meteorological Institute Dr. Isachsen is primarily working on the diagnosis of oceanic eddy activity and its representation in models—with a particular focus on topographic effects on eddy growth and propagation. Under a current IPY project he also works, with collaborators at the University of Oslo, on models of the large-scale circulation and eddy dispersion in the Southern Ocean. Dr. Isachsen also works on data assimilation methods in ROMS, an ocean model with which he has worked for more than five years.

Birgitte Furevik, b.furevik(at)met.no

Furevik has a MSc degree in oceanography from Copenhagen University from 1995 on the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) for detecting and back-tracking oceanic internal waves. The work for the thesis was performed during a stay at the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen (UiB) and at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre (NERSC) in Bergen. 1997-2001 she worked on a PhD at NERSC/UiB with the topic “Wind retrieval from ERS Synthetic Aperture Radar images - application in the marginal ice zone and in coastal regions” and received the PhD degree in November 2001. 2001-2005, Furevik held a position as post doc. and later as research scientist at NERSC. Her main field was microwave remote sensing (SAR and scatterometer), in particular with the application of offshore wind resource estimation. Since April 2005, she has been with the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Bergen, as a research scientist. She is responsible for coastal wave modelling and forecasting at the institute, but works also with ocean winds from models, in situ observations and satellite. At present the focus of this work is on coastal variability and on winds in the boundary layer above 10m.

Harald Schyberg, h.schyberg(at)met.no

Harald Schyberg is Senior Scientist in the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) Division of the R&D Department. Fields of expertise comprise use of satellite observations in data assimilation for NWP and for extraction of sea surface and sea ice information as well as observation impact studies in NWP. Member of ESA ADM (Atmospheric Dynamic Mission) Science Advisory Group, SRNWP (the Short-Range Numerical Weather Prediction programme of the European meteorological services) Expert Team on Data Assimilation and EUCOS (EUMETNET Composite Observing System) Science Advisory Team.

Gunnar Noer, g.noer(at)met.no

Gunnar Noer took his Master of Science on parameterization of convective cloud cover in 1997. Since 1998 he has been working operationally as a senior forecaster at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, in the Forecasting Division in Tromsø, Northern Norway. Since 2000 he has been leading a resource group on Polar Lows, and has in that capacity collected and studied data on a large number of Polar Lows in the Nordic Seas. He has been responsible for the developing and testing of the operational methodology of forecasting of Polar Lows at the Institute. He has also cooperated with several other national and international science communities on the topic and has contributed on several studies. Since 2010 he has been working as a developer for arctic meteorology at the Forecasting Division in Tromsø.