Hannah is an atmospheric scientist and Senior Research Fellow at the Earth Commons. Her research uses atmospheric observations to quantify greenhouse gas fluxes and their drivers at the spatial and temporal resolutions needed to improve process understanding and support climate policy. Her Ph.D. work used methane observations from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) aboard the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite to quantify methane emissions across North America at 25 km × 25 km resolution, improving understanding of emissions from individual states, urban areas, and landfills. As a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she used data from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) to estimate carbon dioxide fluxes and to assess how much information satellite observations can provide about them. She leads an international team implementing these methods in the Integrated Carbon Inversion, an open-source tool that will use atmospheric observations of both carbon dioxide and methane to infer emissions. At Georgetown, she will apply these methods to improve understanding of the emission sources of fluorinated gases.
After completing her B.S. in Environmental Engineering at Yale University, Hannah spent a year working for the Union of Concerned Scientists as a legislative assistant. She completed her Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Engineering at Harvard University and her postdoctoral fellowship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.