Research

My research combines satellite remote sensing, radiative transfer and inverse methods to measure greenhouse gases and to understand how well those measurements can be trusted. Lab projects and results are on the ERSeLab site.

Greenhouse gas retrievals from satellites

Estimating column-averaged carbon dioxide and methane from reflected sunlight measured by OCO-2, GeoCarb and TROPOMI, and understanding where those retrievals can be trusted.

Validation against ground-based measurements

Comparing satellite products with TCCON, the ground-based network of Fourier transform spectrometers, to diagnose biases and quantify uncertainty.

Radiative transfer

Forward modeling of how gases, aerosols and the surface shape the spectrum a satellite sees, including the spectroscopy that underlies it.

Carbon flux estimation and regional inversions

Using observations to infer emissions and uptake at the surface. Fluxes must be estimated at every model time, so errors are correlated in time, which is what makes the problem more interesting than standard sequential data assimilation. Current work includes methane inversions over the New York City domain with Gaussian linear methods and error covariance diagnostics.