Britton Stephens is a Senior Scientist in the Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A. Britt received a Bachelor’s degree 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. His research has focused on developing and deploying new instruments for tower, ship, and aircraft-based observations of atmospheric O2 and CO2, and on synthesizing data sets and models to elucidate global carbon cycle processes. Britt’s carbon-cycle interests span terrestrial ecology, oceanography, atmospheric dynamics, and climate change mitigation.

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

Britt participated in the COBRA (2000, 2003) and START-08 airborne campaigns and served as the mission scientist for ACME-04 and ACME-07. In 2007, he led a synthesis of global airborne CO2 observations with a collection of atmospheric transport models that resulted in a major revision to our understanding of the latitudinal distribution of carbon sinks. 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 for 6 weeks 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, an 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.

Expanded descriptions of Britt's background and research can be found in a 2004 NCAR People Spotlight, in a 2009 NSF-prepared Video, in a 2014 interview for the journal Carbon Management, and in a 2021 UCAR/NCAR Meet the Experts Q&A session.