Einar Ólason
Research Leader, Senior Researcher
Einar Ólason obtained his PhD in oceanography from the University of Hamburg (Germany) in 2012. He worked on modelling land-fast ice in the Kara Sea. Since 2020, he has been leading the Sea Ice Modelling Group at the Nansen Center.
Ólason focuses on sea-ice physics and its numerical modelling. Our ability to model how the ice moves and the interactions between the ocean and atmosphere through the ice are important for both navigation in and near the ice and for understanding climate and climate change in the Arctic. Ólason is interested in furthering our understanding of the physical object that is sea ice, through numerical modelling. . He is also interested in the evolution of the Arctic ice cover and how sea ice influences the ocean and atmosphere as it modulates both momentum and heat fluxes between the two media.
Ólason has participated in sea-ice research from both a modelling and observational perspective. He has produced his own sea-ice model from scratch and participated in developing the earth system model ICON developed at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He joined the sea-ice modelling group at the Nansen Center as he was inspired by their push to develop the next-generation sea-ice model neXtSIM, which uses a new and innovative approach to sea-ice mechanics modelling.
