Christian Scharun

ESSI Earth and Space Science Informatics

The 2021 Virtual Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (vOSPP) Award is awarded to Christian Scharun for the poster/PICO entitled:

Modeling methane from the North Sea region with ICON-ART (Scharun, C.; Ruhnke, R.; Weimer, M.; Braesicke, P.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Christian Scharun studied mathematics and geography at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). In 2018 he joined as a PhD the ‘Digital Earth’ project of the Helmholtz Association. The topic of his PhD is to quantify the emission of the greenhouse gas methane from boreholes in the North Sea which are missing in the typical inventories widely used by the scientific community.

Christian Scharun used and developed a suite of work flows to determine these missing emissions including bottom up and top down approaches. For the latter, he developed a new data science and mathematical driven method, the pattern algorithm (Scharun et al., 2021). The overall goal of the pattern algorithm is to identify hotspot areas within the background noise of atmospheric data. This new method includes spaciotemporal proxy data and a selection algorithm and has been trained by atmospheric chemistry simulations. By applying the algorithm to atmospheric measurements of the Sentinal-5P TROPOMI satellite experiment emissions from the boreholes in the North Sea are derived out of the atmospheric background.

Christian presented the new work flow and algorithm at various national and international conferences and seminars. For his presentation he received the first prize of the innovation contest ‘Falling Walls Lab’ in Karlsruhe.

The work of Christian deals with a multidisciplinary challenge including spacial data infrastructure interoperability, quality and uncertainty information and geospatial data processing to come up with a new solution for an urgent problem, the quantification of the emissions of the greenhouse gas methane.