A new GC-Net station for ICELINK: Site A
By Nanna B. Karlsson
The GEUS-led Greenland Climate Network (GC-Net) provides valuable in-situ measurements of climate variables, snow accumulation and surface properties to the ICELINK project. Servicing the weather stations is always demanding work, but this trip carried a little extra weight: alongside the usual round of maintenance, the team installed a brand-new station at a location called Site A. This location isn’t just another point on the GC-Net map. Next month, an ICELINK team will return to drill a firn core in exactly the same spot, pairing the new station’s measurements with past climate information from the firn core.
June, 2026 – A team led by Nanna B. Karlsson from GEUS’s department of Glaciology and Climate, consisting of Anne M. Solgaard, Chris Shields and guest collaborator P. Toose from Environment and Climate Change Canada, travelled to Greenland to carry out maintenance on existing GC-Net weather stations and to set up two new stations. Unlike a routine service stop, setting up a new station meant starting from scratch: raising the mast section by section and mounting the full instrument suite — sonic rangers, thermistor string, anemometers, radiometer, datalogger and solar panel — one piece at a time.
Because Site A sits in the accumulation zone, the weather station consists of a central mast and is based on a lightweight aluminium tube design, built specifically so a four-person field team can raise a fully instrumented station by hand without a crane — a real consideration when everything has to fit on a ski-equipped Twin Otter alongside the rest of the gear. Two booms sit at right angles on the mast, carrying duplicate sensors at different heights so the temperature, humidity and wind changes can be measured through the lowest few metres of the atmosphere. A radiometer measures the incoming and outgoing shortwave and longwave radiation that drives the surface energy budget, twin sonic rangers track how the snow surface itself rises and falls through the year, and finally a thermistor string reaching 10 m down into the firn records the temperatures in the subsurface. A small solar panel and battery box keep everything running through the polar night, and an Iridium satellite link reports the data back hourly. In fact, measurements from Site are already available on the GC-Net website (link:). The trip to Site A took place from the GRIP camp, funded by the ERC project Green2Ice and led by University of Copenhagen. The GRIP camp hosted the team, their NorlandAir TwinOtter and helped make the logistics around Site A possible.
