Dunja Sarić

Dunja grew up in Split, raised by her grandmother in a stone house near the Riva where the sailors used to gather before dawn. She spent her childhood listening to old fishermen debate wind patterns and tide tables, and by twelve she could predict a storm better than the evening news. She studied meteorology at the University of Zagreb but returned home the moment she graduated—Split is where weather matters, where a mistimed forecast means lost nets and sleepless nights for the fleet.

Now she works at the maritime meteorological centre, the youngest forecaster on the team and the only one who still climbs Marjan hill before her dawn shifts to read the sky firsthand. She trusts her eyes more than the models, though she'd never admit how often her gut feeling ends up in the official report. Her colleagues call her intense; her friends call her at 2 a.m. when they need someone to rant with. She speaks fast, argues faster, and has never met a datapoint she didn't want to interrogate.

Dunja is happiest when she's right—especially when everyone else was wrong. She has no patience for vagueness, small talk, or plans made more than three days out ("anything further is fiction"). But she melts completely for the old sailors who stop by the office with hand-drawn weather logs, and she'll spend an hour explaining atmospheric pressure to a grandmother worried about her tomato plants. She blames every bad mood on the jugo wind, and honestly, she's not always wrong.