Recent methane trends derived from S5P/TROPOMI data

Abstract

<p>Methane (CH<sub>4</sub>) has a relatively long tropospheric lifetime and is consequently a well-mixed greenhouse gas. CH<sub>4</sub>, released by several<br />types of human activity and natural processes, is one important driver of climate change. The global mean concentration of CH<sub>4</sub> has<br />increased by 156% between the beginning of the industrial revolution around 1750 and 2019, reaching roughly 1866 ppb in 2019 (IPCC).<br />The time dependence of this increase is not well understood. For example, it is not entirely clear why CH<sub>4</sub> growth rates reached record <br />high values in 2020 and 2021. Furthermore, the number of published growth rates (annual methane increases) is limited and includes data<br />from NOAA and the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Hence the rate of increase of CH<sub>4</sub> calculated from independent data sources are<br />valuable for cross-verification and in furthering our understanding of the methane cycle.<br />The TROPOMI instrument onboard the Sentinel-5P satellite provides daily CH<sub>4</sub> data with a spatial resolution of roughly 7x7 km²<br />and global coverage. We analyze the TROPOMI CH<sub>4</sub> data with the goal of determining robust values of the annual methane increases (AMI)<br />for both global and zonally resolved data. For this we utilize a dynamic linear model approach to separate the underlying methane level,<br />the seasonal and short-term variations. The AMIs are defined as the difference in the underlying (i.e. fitted) methane level between<br />the first and last day of a year. In this contribution, we present first results for global and zonal TROPOMI AMIs for the years 2019-2022.<br />We compare the resulting global TROPOMI AMIs with data from NOAA and Copernicus and discuss the distribution of zonal AMIs for the given years.</p>

Infrared Radiative Effects of Increasing CO2 and CH4 on the Atmosphere in Antarctica Compared to the Arctic

“…The resulting data set used in this paper can be accessed at Notholt (2023b). The additional programs to calculate the model-observation comparison, the spline fitting routine and programs for creating the Figures are available at Schmithüsen et al (2023).…”

Comparative Analysis and High−Precision Modeling of Tropospheric CH4 in the Yangtze River Delta of China Obtained from the TROPOMI and GOSAT

“…Liu et al [23] used the TROPOMI CH 4 product to estimate CH 4 emissions from agricultural areas in eastern Ontario, allowing the predictions of agricultural CH 4 emissions in eastern Ontario to be validated. Hachmeister et al [24] inversely extrapolated TROPOMI−derived data to obtain the latest global CH 4 concentration trends. Jerome et al [25] used CH 4 data from the high−resolution TROPOMI dataset for processing and simple classification to detect anomalous emissions from various sources.…”