DW
Member Since 2003
Debra Wunch
Associate Professor, University of Toronto
Member, Atmospheric Sciences Ascent Award Committee
Professional Experience
University of Toronto
Associate Professor
2022 - Present
University of Toronto
Assistant Professor
2016 - 2022
California Institute of Technology
Research Scientist
2007 - 2015
Show All Professional Experience
Show Less Professional Experience
Education
Doctorate
2007
Honors & Awards
Atmospheric Sciences Ascent Award
Received December 2023
Citation

Prof. Debra Wunch has established a vibrant research effort at the University of Toronto where her leadership and scholarship have played a central role in enabling large space-based remote sensing efforts of greenhouse gases to flourish. Wunch is an extremely rigorous, agile, and effective scientist, thinker, and communicator, exactly the “right stuff” for the Ascent Award. She is an innovator who is making great strides to improve our understanding of greenhouse gases and the atmospheric and human processes that regulate their concentrations in the atmosphere. She works across a range of spatial scales. For methane, Wunch has developed an unusually comprehensive end-to-end approach, assembling an inventory with building-scale resolution, evaluating that inventory with ambient observations at high space and time resolution using mobile bicycle measurements, and evaluating the integrated emissions using remote sensing. Wunch is a pioneer of the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON). Her leadership in the early demonstrations, then as deputy chair representing the Americas beginning in 2016 and as chair of the entire network beginning in 2020, is a sign of the high esteem of her colleagues and a signal of the sort of leadership we expect of Ascent Award winners. Wunch extensively used measurements of vertical profiles over the TCCON sites to provide a traceable link between her absolute spectroscopic measurements and the primary gas standards from NOAA/World Meteorological Organization. She teased out critical systematic errors in this comparison, using her deep knowledge of spectroscopy, atmospheric structure, and the physics of the FTS spectrometers. She succeeded in demonstrating the absolute spectroscopy of CO2 to better than 0.3 part per million (0.1%), a truly extraordinary achievement. In addition, she has distinguished herself with careful and insightful application of her measurements starting from her early paper on deriving CO2 emissions from daily FTS data in Los Angeles (an instant classic) to her more recent work in understanding hemispheric exchanges of CO2 and relating these to climatic variation. In that work she showed the evidence for a large temperature dependence of respiration in the boreal carbon cycle. This is a powerful statement about the future of the global carbon cycle in a warming world. Wunch’s work has shown the power of the total column, long time series measurements to challenge and falsify accepted wisdom and models. Please join us in honoring an exceptional scholar and colleague.

—Ronald C. Cohen, University of California, Berkeley



Response
I am truly honored to have received the AGU Atmospheric Sciences Ascent Award, and I am keenly aware that my research has been both enabled and enriched by a large community of scientists. Thank you to Ron Cohen for the generous nomination and citation, Steve Wofsy for his support, Paul Wennberg for his mentorship, and to all three for being outstanding role models. I am indebted to the tight-knit and welcoming Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) community for their support and dedication to their craft, and to the talented and tireless satellite remote sensing community. Research in this field is a team effort, and I feel extremely lucky to have the opportunity to work with phenomenal undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and colleagues from around the world. —–Debra Wunch, University of Toronto, Toronto,Canada
See Details
Close Details
Publications
Methane Growth Rate Estimation and Its Causes in Western Canada Using Satellite Observations

In this study, the GOSAT Proxy Retrieval (v9.0) data product of column‐averaged dry‐air mole fractions of atmospheric methane (XCH4) fo...

November 01, 2021
AGU Abstracts
Strengthening the Connection of Reference Standards and Ground-based Atmospheric Total Column Validation Networks
AGU 2024
atmospheric sciences | 09 december 2024
Annmarie Eldering, Elizabeth Spicer, Debra Wunch, ...
Satellite remote sensing measurements of total column CO2 and CH4 have been collected from space since 2009, and new systems are deployed regularly. T...
View Abstract
Comparing Methodologies for Quantifying Landfill Methane Emissions
AGU 2024
atmospheric sciences | 09 december 2024
Lawson Gillespie, Sebastien Ars, Cassandra Worthy,...
Landfills are a significant source of anthropogenic methane emissions, making up 17% of Canadas anthropogenic methane burden. We compare emission rate...
View Abstract
Assessing Urban Methane Emissions with Satellite-Derived Enhancement Ratios
ONLINE POSTER SESSION FOR ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES: URBAN ANALYSES XXII
atmospheric sciences | 25 january 2024
Jon-Paul Mastrogiacomo, Nasrin Mostafavi Pak, Laws...
Reductions in methane emissions will play an important role in meeting short-term emissions reduction goals, and feature prominently in many municipal...
View Abstract
Volunteer Experience
2024 - 2027
Member
Atmospheric Sciences Ascent Award Committee
Check out all of Debra Wunch’s AGU Research!
View All Research Now