New Report Recommends a Nationwide Effort to Better Estimate Methane Emissions

The U.S. should take bold steps to improve measurement, monitoring, and inventories of methane emissions caused by human activities, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  Better data on methane—a greenhouse gas that contributes to air pollution and threatens public and worker safety—would help inform decisions related to climate, economics, and human health.

“Methane is getting more attention because it is a potent, short-lived greenhouse gas that is increasing,” said James W.C. White, professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and chair of the committee that conducted the study and wrote the report.  “There have been recent advances in our abilities to measure and monitor methane from its many sources, and now we need to strengthen and interlink these different approaches.”

Anthropogenic sources of methane emissions span various sectors of the economy such as energy, agriculture, and waste disposal.  There are a variety of reasons, beyond climate change, to measure, monitor, and track methane emissions. For example, monitoring of methane emissions is important to protecting the health and safety of workers in industries such as coal mining, and recovery of methane can have an economic benefit as a source of energy.

In general, there are two approaches to estimate these emissions.  The top-down approach estimates emissions using observations of atmospheric methane concentrations and models that simulate their transport from the source to the observation location.  The bottom-up approach measures emissions at the scale of individual methane emitters, such as natural gas wells or cattle farms, and uses those results to extrapolate emissions at regional and national scales.

Read more at National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, And Medicine