In order to operate successfully and reliably in inhospitable polar climates, an aerobiological sampler requires a number of characteristics. It must sample a large volume of air, sample a broad size range of particles efficiently, produce easy to analyse, quantitative samples; operate in extremes of temperature and in high winds and cope with an accumulation of snow and rime ice. A sampler, built to overcome these problems, is described in this paper and was evaluated in wind tunnel tests which investigated the effect of wind speed and particle size on performance in comparison with rotorod samplers. The new sampler was more efficient than rotorod samplers for sampling 5 mu m particles at low wind speeds (2 m s(-1)) but results for the two samplers were similar for 30 mu m particles and at 4 m s(-1).