Sean Crowell
he/him/his
Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences
PhD, Mathematics
- Office Location
- 483 Hutchison Hall
- Web Address
- Website
Office Hours: By appointment
Research Overview
Dr. Sean Crowell employs instruments and models to improve scientific understanding the exchange of carbon between the land, ocean, and atmosphere. More specifically, he uses in situ and space-based observations in concert with atmospheric models and machine learning emulators to retrieve actionable scientific information from satellite remote sensing data in order to constrain surface fluxes, and additionally attributes those fluxes to different carbon cycle processes. He was formerly the Deputy Principal Investigator and Project Scientist for the Geostationary Carbon Observatory (GeoCarb) mission, a geostationary carbon gas imaging satellite. He is a member of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2/3 and ASCENDS science teams and works with international institutions on development of observations and models to improve our understanding of the carbon cycle.
Research Interests
- Remote Sensing
- Atmospheric Transport Modeling
- Terrestrial Carbon Cycle
- Anthropogenic Carbon Emissions
Selected Publications
- McGarragh, G. R., O'Dell, C. W., Crowell, S. M. R., Somkuti, P., Burgh, E. B., and Moore III, B.: The GeoCarb greenhouse gas retrieval algorithm: simulations and sensitivity to sources of uncertainty, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 17, 1091–1121, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-17-1091-2024, 2024.
- Crowell, S., Haist, T., Tscherpel, M., Caron, J., Burgh, E., and Moore III, B.: Performance and polarization response of slit homogenizers for the GeoCarb mission, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 16, 195–208, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-16-195-2023, 2023.
- Byrne, B., Baker, D. F., Basu, S., Bertolacci, M., …, Crowell, S., et al: National CO2 budgets (2015–2020) inferred from atmospheric CO2 observations in support of the global stocktake, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 963–1004, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-963-2023, 2023.
- Helene Peiro, Sean Crowell, Andrew Schuh, David F Baker, Chris O’Dell, Andrew R Jacobson, Frederic Chevallier, Junjie Liu, Annmarie Eldering, David Crisp, et al. Four years of global carbon cycle observed from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) Version 9 and in situ data and comparison to OCO-2 version 7. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 22(2):1097–1130, 2022.
- Andrew E Schuh, Brendan Byrne, Andrew R Jacobson, Sean MR Crowell, Feng Deng, David F Baker, Matthew S Johnson, Sajeev Philip, and Brad Weir. On the role of atmospheric model transport uncertainty in estimating the Chinese land carbon sink. Nature, 603(7901):E13–E14, 2022.
- Xiao-Ming Hu, Sean Crowell, Qingyu Wang, Yao Zhang, Kenneth J Davis, Ming Xue, Xiangming Xiao, Berrien Moore, Xiaocui Wu, Yonghoon Choi, et al. Dynamical downscaling of co2 in 2016 over the contiguous United States using WRF-VPRM, a weather-biosphere-online-coupled model. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 12(4):e2019MS001875, 2020.
- Sean Crowell, David Baker, Andrew Schuh, Sourish Basu, Andrew R Jacobson, Frederic Chevallier, Junjie Liu, Feng Deng, Liang Feng, Kathryn McKain, et al. The 2015–2016 carbon cycle as seen from OCO-2 and the global in situ network. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 19(15):9797–9831, 2019.
- Sean MR Crowell, S Randolph Kawa, Edward V Browell, Dorit M Hammerling, Berrien Moore, Kevin Schaefer, and Scott C Doney. On the ability of space-based passive and active remote sensing observations of CO2 to detect flux perturbations to the carbon cycle. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 123(2):1460–1477, 2018.
- Berrien Moore III, Sean MR Crowell, Peter J Rayner, Jack Kumer, Christopher W O’Dell, Denis O’Brien, Steven Utembe, Igor Polonsky, David Schimel, and James Lemen. The potential of the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory (GeoCarb) to provide multi-scale constraints on the carbon cycle in the Americas. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 6:109, 2018.