Congratulations, Barbara – You are the first one!

Yesterday Barbara Szenasi from UVSQ defended her PhD thesis – as the first of our 13 MEMO² ESRs. Congratulations!

Barbara is one of our modellers, interested in the quantification of errors when monitoring atmospheric methane (CH₄) emissions in Europe. Particularly, she was investigating how errors in transport models and emission inventories can be quantified and how we can improve here, e.g. by implementing isotopic measurements or improving our knowledge about making measurements more useful for estimating CH₄ emissions at the European scale. Her findings led i.a. to the conclusions that more accurate spatial distributions of emissions are needed to improve inventories. Also the implementation of long-term or quasi-continuous isotopic measurements are useful to allocate sources of CH₄, with a minimum required instrument precision of ≤ 0.05 ‰ for δ¹³C and ≤ 1 ‰ for δ²H, respectively. Recommendations based on the conclusions are e.g. the enhancement of temporal and spatial resolutions of measurement series and an improved deployment of instrumentation at existing measurement sites such as those of ICOS to further increase the reliability of CH₄ emission estimates.

Barbara will now start a postdoc at Wageningen University (WU), where she already executed one of her secondments during MEMO². A good example why the philosophy of MSCAs – broad training and intersectoral networking – is such a success!

All the best for your future!