PhD project
I work at SRON as a PhD candidate, and I am also partially affiliated to GHGSat Inc. in Canada. The formal part of my PhD program takes place at the VU Amsterdam, but in practice I work full-time at SRON with prof. dr. Ilse Aben as promotor and dr. J.D. (Bram) Maasakkers as co-promotor and main supervisor. My background is in Aerospace Engineering – Spaceflight, which I studied at Delft University of Technology.
TROPOMI methane super-emitter plume detections
In the first part of the PhD project I worked on developing the conceptual framework for, and first version of, the machine learning based automated detection pipeline for detecting methane super-emitter plumes in TROPOMI data. This work (DOI: 10.5194/acp-23-9071-2023) is the first global overview of methane super-emitter plumes from all major human-caused source categories for a full year using TROPOMI observations. For the year 2021 we detected 2974 methane super-emitter plumes, which provided insight into the global distribution of large methane super-emitter hotspots, many of which are good candidates for fast and significant mitigation of methane emissions.
Our group now uses this automated detection pipeline in several operational projects with real-world impact, for example in a synergetic collaboration with GHGSat. In late 2022, together with colleagues, we further operationalized this TROPOMI detection pipeline and from then onwards our group uploads an overview of the most recent methane super-emitter plume detections on a weekly basis to www.sron.nl/pijlers/aardoberservatie/methaan.
Current area of research
Next to being involved in these projects in a support role, I am currently researching novel use-cases and synergies for detecting methane plumes using machine learning techniques, both with TROPOMI and other methane-observing satellite instruments.
