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Mapping of North American methane emissions with high spatial resolution by inversion of SCIAMACHY satellite data
We estimate methane emissions from North America with high spatial resolution by inversion of Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY) satellite observations using the Goddard Earth Observing System Chemistry (GEOS-Chem) chemical transport model and its adjoint. The inversion focuses on summer 2004 when data from the Intercontinental Chemical Transport Experiment-North America (INTEX-A) aircraft campaign over the eastern U.S. are available to validate the SCIAMACHY retrievals and evaluate the inversion. From the INTEX-A data we identify and correct a water vapor-dependent bias in the SCIAMACHY data. We conduct an initial inversion of emissions on the horizontal grid of GEOS-Chem (1/2° × 2/3°) to identify correction tendencies relative to the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) v4.2 emission inventory used as a priori. We then cluster these grid cells with a hierarchical algorithm to extract the maximum information from the SCIAMACHY observations. A 1000 cluster ensemble can be adequately constrained, providing ~100 km resolution across North America. Analysis of results indicates that the Hudson Bay Lowland wetlands source is 2.1Tga-1, lower than the a priori but consistent with other recent estimates. Anthropogenic U.S. emissions are 30.1 ± 1.3 Tg a-1, compared to 25.8Tga-1 and 28.3 Tg a-1 in the EDGAR v4.2 and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) inventories, respectively. We find that U.S. livestock emissions are 40% greater than in these two inventories. No such discrepancy is apparent for overall U.S. oil and gas emissions, although this may reflect some compensation between overestimate of emissions from storage/distribution and underestimate from production. We find that U.S. livestock emissions are 70% greater than the oil and gas emissions, in contrast to the EDGAR v4.2 and EPA inventories where these two sources are of comparable magnitude
Assessment of the climate commitments and additional mitigation policies of the United States
Revised methane emissions factors and spatially distributed annual carbon fluxes for global livestock
Three decades of global methane sources and sinks
Methane is an important greenhouse gas, responsible for about 20 of the warming induced by long-lived greenhouse gases since pre-industrial times. By reacting with hydroxyl radicals, methane reduces the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere and generates ozone in the troposphere. Although most sources and sinks of methane have been identified, their relative contributions to atmospheric methane levels are highly uncertain. As such, the factors responsible for the observed stabilization of atmospheric methane levels in the early 2000s, and the renewed rise after 2006, remain unclear. Here, we construct decadal budgets for methane sources and sinks between 1980 and 2010, using a combination of atmospheric measurements and results from chemical transport models, ecosystem models, climate chemistry models and inventories of anthropogenic emissions. The resultant budgets suggest that data-driven approaches and ecosystem models overestimate total natural emissions. We build three contrasting emission scenarios � which differ in fossil fuel and microbial emissions � to explain the decadal variability in atmospheric methane levels detected, here and in previous studies, since 1985. Although uncertainties in emission trends do not allow definitive conclusions to be drawn, we show that the observed stabilization of methane levels between 1999 and 2006 can potentially be explained by decreasing-to-stable fossil fuel emissions, combined with stable-to-increasing microbial emissions. We show that a rise in natural wetland emissions and fossil fuel emissions probably accounts for the renewed increase in global methane levels after 2006, although the relative contribution of these two sources remains uncertain