Recent methane surges reveal heightened emissions from tropical inundated areas
journal contribution
posted on 2025-03-07, 11:14 authored by Xin Lin, Shushi Peng, Philippe Ciais, Didier Hauglustaine, Xin Lan, Gang Liu, Michel Ramonet, Yi Xi, Yi Yin, Zhen Zhang, Hartmut Bösch, Philippe Bousquet, Frédéric Chevallier, Bogang Dong, Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi, Santanu Halder, Robert ParkerRobert Parker, Benjamin Poulter, Tianjiao Pu, Marine Remaud, Alexandra Runge, Marielle Saunois, Rona L Thompson, Yukio Yoshida, Bo ZhengRecord breaking atmospheric methane growth rates were observed in 2020 and 2021 (15.2±0.5 and 17.8±0.5 parts per billion per year), the highest since the early 1980s. Here we use an ensemble of atmospheric inversions informed by surface or satellite methane observations to infer emission changes during these two years relative to 2019. Results show global methane emissions increased by 20.3±9.9 and 24.8±3.1 teragrams per year in 2020 and 2021, dominated by heightened emissions from tropical and boreal inundated areas, aligning with rising groundwater storage and regional warming. Current process-based wetland models fail to capture the tropical emission surges revealed by atmospheric inversions, likely due to inaccurate representation of wetland extents and associated methane emissions. Our findings underscore the critical role of tropical inundated areas in the recent methane emission surges and highlight the need to integrate multiple data streams and modeling tools for better constraining tropical wetland emissions.
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Author affiliation
College of Science & Engineering Physics & AstronomyPublished in
Nature CommunicationsVolume
15Issue
1Pagination
10894Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLCissn
2041-1723eissn
2041-1723Acceptance date
2024-12-04Copyright date
2024Available date
2025-03-07Publisher DOI
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EnglandLanguage
enPublisher version
Deposited by
Dr Robert ParkerDeposit date
2025-02-03Data Access Statement
The datasets that support the findings of this study are publicly available as follows. The global atmospheric methane growth rates and marine boundary layer references are obtained from https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4 and https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/mbl/ respectively. The assimilated surface CH4 observations from NOAA and ICOS networks are available at https://doi.org/10.15138/VNCZ-M766 and https://doi.org/10.18160/KCYX-HA35; surface observations from other networks are available from World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases (https://gaw.kishou.go.jp/) and Global Environmental Database (https://db.cger.nies.go.jp/). The GOSAT NIES full physics XCH4 retrievals are available at https://data2.gosat.nies.go.jp/ through registration; the GOSAT University of Leicester proxy XCH4 retrievals are available at https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/18ef8247f52a4cb6a14013f8235cc1eb. The EDGAR v7.0 time series of country-level emissions and sector-specific gridmaps are downloaded from https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset_ghg70. The hourly ERA5 reanalysis data are obtained from https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5. The monthly datasets of temperature and precipitation from CRU TS v4.06 are obtained from https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/cru_ts_4.06/. The monthly precipitation data from MERRA2 are obtained from https://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/reanalysis/MERRA-2/. The monthly precipitation data from MSWEP v2.8 are obtained from http://www.gloh2o.org/mswep/. The dataset of monthly global water storage/height anomalies from GRACE-FO is available at https://doi.org/10.5067/TEMSC-3JC63. The Regular Flooded Wetlands maps are available at https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.892657. The monthly wetland extents based on CYGNSS observations are obtained from the Berkeley-RWAWC product available at https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/CYGNSS_L3_UC_BERKELEY_WATERMASK_V3.1. The monthly fire emissions from Global Fire Emissions Database version 4.1, which includes small fire burned area, are obtained from https://www.geo.vu.nl/~gwerf/GFED/GFED4/. The anthropogenic emissions from the CEDS emission inventory up to 2019 are available at https://data.pnnl.gov/dataset/CEDS-4-21-21. The gridded near-real time fossil fuel combustion data that include confinement-induced reductions in 2020 and rebound in 2021 are obtained from https://carbonmonitor.org/. The global gridded anthropogenic CH4 emissions and the outputs of WEMs, LMDZ-INCA and atmospheric inversions are publicly available at Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.27207999.v1). Source data are provided with this paper.Rights Retention Statement
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