Initially, in the 1990th, he participated in the specification of the SCIAMACHY instrument and was scientific secretary of the GOME Science Advisory Committee. In 2000 he received PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from University of Bremen, for his work on radiative transfer model development and SCIAMACHY near-infrared/short-wave-infrared (NIR/SWIR) "line-absorber" (CO, H2O, O2, CH4, CO2, ...) retrieval algorithm development. He "invented" the WFM-DOAS retrieval algorithm which has been used for a number of scientific publications and related SCIAMACHY CO, CH4, and CO2 data sets and is still in use today.

Since 2001, Michael Buchwitz is leading a research group at IUP. This "Carbon group" is responsible for most of the IUP activities related to the carbon gases, in particular for CO, CH4 and CO2 retrieval using SCIAMACHY, MAMAP and simulated CarbonSat observations. M. Buchwitz participated in several national and international projects such as the EU projects EVERGRE

EN, ACCENT, AMFIC, CityZen, and MACC and several ESA projects such as PROMOTE and the ongoing projects ADVANSE and GHG-CCI. M. Buchwitz is leading the ESA/ESRIN project ADVANSE and is Science Leader of ESA/ESRIN's GHG-CCI project, which is one of several sub-projects of ESA's Climate Change Initiative (CCI) and will deliver the European Essential Climate Variable (ECV) Greenhouse Gases (GHG). M. Buchwitz is co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications (see below). He is a member of ESA's Sentinel 5 Precursor Mission Advisory Group (S5P MAG).