19 July 2014, by Matt Shupe, [77N, 126E]:
Paul Johnston
Our resident wind expert is Paul Johnston. He has been ‘instrumental’ in the first two deployments of a 449-MHz wind profiler from a ship in the Arctic Ocean: The first of these on a trip we took together in 2008 on this same icebreaker, and the second now. Paul knows these systems very well, and on about day one or two after firing up the system, he was troubled by some of the profiler measurements, suggesting that maybe the cabling was wrong. I had a hard time believing that because I was involved in the cabling process a few weeks prior…. But indeed Paul’s intuition was sound! We traced the lines and found an obvious issue of two cables swapped. Good thing Paul was here to start the project otherwise we may have carried on in sub-optimal form. Speaking of optimal, Paul is continually seeking it: Changing the post-processing algorithms to squeeze out the best measurements possible; paying attention to even the subtlest of details. It is these qualities that ultimately lead to a very solid data set. Paul is a major asset to our team, both from the instrument perspective and as a colleague. Today we had Wind Profiling 101, where Paul pulled out the notepad and drew some pictures, wrote some equations, and helped me get through chapter one!
