Who is Norbert Untersteiner?
Norbert Untersteiner was instrumental in the design of the Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment (AIDJEX) program, which was the first major western sea ice experiment constructed specifically to answer emerging questions about how sea ice moves and changes in response to the influence of ocean and atmosphere.
In the course of a long career he developed the first mathematical descriptions of the mass and heat balance of Arctic sea ice. He began his career not with sea ice but with land ice: he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna who had worked on Alpine and Central Asian Glaciers when he was hired to become Chief Scientist for the International Geophysical Year Drifting Station Alpha. After floating on the ice for a year he returned for a brief sojourn to Austria. In 1962 he returned to the United States to join the faculty at the University of Washington where he established a teaching and research program in snow and ice. Among his graduate students are sea ice experts Alan Thorndike, Gary Maykut, John Wettlaufer, and William Lipscomb.
From 1971 to 1978 he served as Project Director for AIDJEX, and at the end of that project he started the Arctic Data Buoy Program. (Drifting buoys from this program are to this day the only continuing source of pressure and temperature data for the Arctic Ocean; data that are incorporated in gridded fields on this Atlas.) The core staff for the AIDJEX project was moved into the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and became the APL Polar Science Center. Untersteiner retired from the University of Washington and is now Sydney Chapman Professor of Physical Science at the University of Alaska.