carbon-cycle, oceanography, terrestrial ecology, atmospheric dynamics, atmospheric chemistry, and climate change

Britt Stephens is a Senior Scientist with the EOL Research Aviation Facility. His research focuses on developing and deploying new instruments for aircraft, ship, and tower-based observations of atmospheric O2, CO2, and CH4, and on synthesizing data sets and models to elucidate global carbon cycle processes.  Britt’s carbon-cycle interests span oceanography, terrestrial ecology, atmospheric dynamics, atmospheric chemistry, and climate change.

Britt received a Bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude) in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1999.  Before joining NCAR in 2002, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Carbon Cycle and Greenhouse Gases group.

Britt participated in the COBRA (2000, 2003) and START-08 airborne campaigns and served as the mission scientist for ACME-04 and ACME-07.  Britt was a principal investigator on the HIPPO project (2009-2011), a 3-year global airborne survey of greenhouse and related gases that collected an unprecedented data set of over 90 species from the surface to the tropopause and nearly pole to pole in all seasons.  He maintained a network of mountain-top CO2 instruments in the U.S. Rocky Mountains (2005-2018) that has been used to investigate regional carbon cycling and disturbance impacts. Britt developed and operated a continuous atmospheric O2 / CO2 instrument on a ship transiting the Southern Ocean between Chile and Antarctica (2012-2017). Britt led the O2/N2 Ratio and CO2 Airborne Southern Ocean (ORCAS) study which flew out of Punta Arenas, Chile in early 2016. He participated as an instrument PI on the NASA ATom mission (2016-2018). He has also been a member of the NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory Science Team since 2015. Britt is now leading the Southern Ocean Carbon Gas Observatory, a multi-year NSF Polar Programs funded effort to measure CO2 and other gases from the LC-130 aircraft flying in support of the U.S. Antarctic Program, as well as the international Atmospheric Potential Oxygen Model Intercomparison Project. In 2007 and again in 2026, Britt led syntheses of global airborne CO2 observations with collections of atmospheric transport models that resulted in a major revisions to our understanding of the latitudinal distribution of carbon sinks.

Britt has designed and built an airborne vacuum-ultraviolet absorption O2 instrument, a tower and ship-based fuel-cell O2 instrument, a tower-based autonomous CO2 measurement system, an airborne flask sampling system for laboratory measurement of O2, Ar, and isotopologues of CO2, and an airborne CO2 and CH4 measurement system.