Our guest for the hour is Climate Scientist Nathan Kurtz, who has been to both the North and South Poles nine times with Operation IceBridge, including as a NASA Project Scientist.  He is currently the Deputy Project Scientist of the ICESAT II satellite and has just returned from spending six weeks on the MOSAIC Arctic Ice Expedition.

Nathan received the B.S. degree in Physics from Iowa State University in 2004, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Atmospheric Physics from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in 2007 and 2009, respectively.

He worked on sea ice thickness retrievals from the original ICESat mission during his graduate school studies, and has since focused his work on improving model parameterizations and satellite-based retrievals of sea ice properties from NASA's Operation IceBridge mission as well as ESA's CryoSat-2 radar satellite. He joined the Cryospheric Sciences Branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 2013 and led the IceBridge project from 2015-2018 before moving on to his current position as the ICESat-2 Deputy Project Scientist.