About

Steven C. Wofsy is the Abbott Lawrence Rotch Professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Science at Harvard University. He serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in Environmental Science & Engineering and is a Faculty Associate at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. His primary teaching area is Environmental Science & Engineering. Wofsy's research focuses on environmental science and engineering, with particular attention to climate change, atmospheric chemistry, and global contaminants. He has been involved in projects such as the development of a cutting-edge methane monitor and the MethaneSAT emissions satellite, which aims to detect methane leaks from space. His work has contributed to understanding greenhouse gas emissions, including urban methane emissions, and has been featured in recent news related to climate and environmental technology.

Research topics

• Environmental science
• Computer Science
• Atmospheric sciences
• Ecology
• Geography
• Geology
• Data Mining
• Oceanography
• Information Retrieval
• Climatology
• Chemistry
• Remote sensing
• Physics
• Paleontology
• Biology
• Database
• Meteorology
• Programming language
• World Wide Web
• Mathematics
• Forestry
• Earth science
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Author Correction: The FLUXNET2015 dataset and the ONEFlux processing pipeline for eddy covariance data

  Scientific Data · 2021 · 109 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Information Retrieval
  • Computer Science

  A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00851-9.

  DOI

• Satellite-based survey of extreme methane emissions in the Permian basin

  Science Advances · 2021 · 246 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Geology
  • Earth science

  ), which account for a range between 31 and 53% of the estimated emissions in the sampled area. Our analysis reveals that new facilities are major emitters in the area, often due to inefficient flaring operations (20% of detections). These results put current practices into question and are relevant to guide emission reduction efforts.

  DOI

• The NASA Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) Mission: Imaging the Chemistry of the Global Atmosphere

  Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · 2021 · 139 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Atmospheric sciences
  • Climatology

  Abstract This article provides an overview of the NASA Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission and a summary of selected scientific findings to date. ATom was an airborne measurements and modeling campaign aimed at characterizing the composition and chemistry of the troposphere over the most remote regions of the Pacific, Southern, Atlantic, and Arctic Oceans, and examining the impact of anthropogenic and natural emissions on a global scale. These remote regions dominate global chemical reactivity and are exceptionally important for global air quality and climate. ATom data provide the in situ measurements needed to understand the range of chemical species and their reactions, and to test satellite remote sensing observations and global models over large regions of the remote atmosphere. Lack of data in these regions, particularly over the oceans, has limited our understanding of how atmospheric composition is changing in response to shifting anthropogenic emissions and physical climate change. ATom was designed as a global-scale tomographic sampling mission with extensive geographic and seasonal coverage, tropospheric vertical profiling, and detailed speciation of reactive compounds and pollution tracers. ATom flew the NASA DC-8 research aircraft over four seasons to collect a comprehensive suite of measurements of gases, aerosols, and radical species from the remote troposphere and lower stratosphere on four global circuits from 2016 to 2018. Flights maintained near-continuous vertical profiling of 0.15–13-km altitudes on long meridional transects of the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean basins. Analysis and modeling of ATom data have led to the significant early findings highlighted here.

  DOI

• Gravitational separation of Ar∕N ₂ and age of air in the lowermost stratosphere in airborne observations and a chemical transport model

  Atmospheric chemistry and physics · 2020 · 23 citations

  • Atmospheric sciences
  • Chemistry
  • Environmental science

  Abstract. Accurate simulation of atmospheric circulation, particularly in the lower stratosphere, is challenging due to unresolved wave–mean flow interactions and limited high-resolution observations for validation. Gravity-induced pressure gradients lead to a small but measurable separation of heavy and light gases by molecular diffusion in the stratosphere. Because the relative abundance of Ar to N2 is exclusively controlled by physical transport, the argon-to-nitrogen ratio (Ar∕N2) provides an additional constraint on circulation and the age of air (AoA), i.e., the time elapsed since entry of an air parcel into the stratosphere. Here we use airborne measurements of N2O and Ar∕N2 from nine campaigns with global coverage spanning 2008–2018 to calculate AoA and to quantify gravitational separation in the lowermost stratosphere. To this end, we develop a new N2O–AoA relationship using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. We observe that gravitational separation increases systematically with increasing AoA for samples with AoA between 0 and 3 years. These observations are compared to a simulation of the TOMCAT/SLIMCAT 3-D chemical transport model, which has been updated to include gravitational fractionation of gases. We demonstrate that although AoA at old ages is slightly underestimated in the model, the relationship between Ar∕N2 and AoA is robust and agrees with the observations. This highlights the potential of Ar∕N2 to become a new AoA tracer that is subject only to physical transport phenomena and can supplement the suite of available AoA indicators.

  DOI

• The FLUXNET2015 dataset and the ONEFlux processing pipeline for eddy covariance data

  Scientific Data · 2020 · 1726 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Data Mining
  • Computer Science

  , water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over 1500 site-years, up to and including year 2014). These sites, independently managed and operated, voluntarily contributed their data to create global datasets. Data were quality controlled and processed using uniform methods, to improve consistency and intercomparability across sites. The dataset is already being used in a number of applications, including ecophysiology studies, remote sensing studies, and development of ecosystem and Earth system models. FLUXNET2015 includes derived-data products, such as gap-filled time series, ecosystem respiration and photosynthetic uptake estimates, estimation of uncertainties, and metadata about the measurements, presented for the first time in this paper. In addition, 206 of these sites are for the first time distributed under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license. This paper details this enhanced dataset and the processing methods, now made available as open-source codes, making the dataset more accessible, transparent, and reproducible.

  DOI

• Increasing contribution of peatlands to boreal evapotranspiration in a warming climate

  Nature Climate Change · 2020 · 226 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Atmospheric sciences
  • Climatology
  DOI

Recent grants

• EAGER: MethaneAIR

  NSF · $277k · 2019–2022

• BE/CBC: Continental, Landscape and Ecosystem Scale Fluxes of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and Carbon Monoxide (CO) Gases

  NSF · $1.6M · 2003–2007

• AGS-FIRP Track 3: Methane Emissions Quantification at Scales from 20m to 200km Using the MethaneAIR Imaging Spectrometer on the NSF Gulfstream-V (MAIR-E)

  NSF · $1.3M · 2022–2026

• Collaborative Research: ULTRA-Ex: Metabolism of Boston

  NSF · $30k · 2009–2013

• MRI: Acquisition of Mesoscale Network of Surface Sensors and Solar-tracking Spectrometers

  NSF · $315k · 2013–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Bruce C. Daube

  Harvard University

  531 shared

• J. William Munger

  Harvard University Press

  431 shared

• Michael B. McElroy

  Harvard University

  218 shared

• R. Commane

  Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

  165 shared

• Michael L. Goulden

  161 shared

• Songmiao Fan

  NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

  139 shared

• Jeff Peischl

  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

  138 shared

• F. L. Moore

  Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

  138 shared

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