Christian Frankenberg

Christian Frankenberg is Professor of Environmental Sciences & Engineering (ESE) at Caltech and works on the global carbon cycle. He is the Carbon-I Principal Investigator and responsible for the quality and direction of the investigation.

Dr. Frankenberg has two decades of experience in remote sensing of atmospheric trace gases, in particular methane (C. Frankenberg et al., 2005; Christian Frankenberg, Bergamaschi, et al., 2008; Christian Frankenberg, Thorpe, et al., 2016), carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Dr. Frankenberg’s main research focus is the global carbon cycle and how to connect models with remote sensing data, both for the atmosphere as well as the surface (Christian Frankenberg, Aben, et al., 2011; C. Frankenberg, O’Dell, et al., 2012a; Christian Frankenberg et al., 2014, 2014, 2018; Hayashida et al., 2013; L. He et al., 2019, 2023; L. He, Magney, et al., 2020; Sander Houweling et al., 2014; Humphrey et al., 2021; Irakulis-Loitxate et al., 2021; Jacob et al., 2022). He has developed the proxy method for accurate methane retrievals (C. Frankenberg et al., 2005), improved methane spectroscopy (Christian Frankenberg, Warneke, et al., 2008a; Tran et al., 2010) to minimize biases in satellite data, developed solar chlorophyll fluorescence retrievals from space (C. Frankenberg et al., 2011; Christian Frankenberg, Aben, et al., 2011), wrote the IMAP pre-processor code for OCO-2/3, organized a methane workshop with global experts at Caltech and is currently leading the land surface model development in the Climate Modelling Alliance (CliMA). He also c0-organized the first airborne campaigns for controlled released experiments of methane (Andrew K. Thorpe, Frankenberg, Aubrey, et al., 2016) as well as the first wide-area coverage investigation in the Four Corners area (Christian Frankenberg, Thorpe, et al., 2016).