Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: AGU Advances
Through international agreements, global emissions inventories for methane determined, from atmospheric data support, that evaluations of reported country inventories are limited by spatially variable biases from prior errors combined with limited observation sensitivity, and poorly characterized information content. Bayesian, optimal estimation (OE) evaluates a state-of-the-art inventory (EDGAR v6.0) using satellite-based emissions from 2009 to 2018. The OE quantifies information content (uncertainty reduction, sectoral attribution, spatial resolution) of the satellite-based emissions and disentangles the effect of smoothing error when comparing to an inventory.
Worden et al. [2023] highlight that there are robust differences between satellite and EDGAR for total livestock, rice, and coal emissions. EDGAR and satellite agree that livestock emissions are increasing primarily in the Indo-Pakistan, sub-tropical Africa, and the Southern Brazilian regions. East Asia rice emissions are also increasing. In contrast, low information content for waste and fossil emission trends confounds comparison between EDGAR and satellite; increased sampling and spatial resolution of satellite observations are needed.
Citation: Worden, J. R., Pandey, S., Zhang, Y., Cusworth, D. H., Qu, Z., Bloom, A. A., et al. (2023). Verifying methane inventories and trends with atmospheric methane data. AGU Advances, 4, e2023AV000871. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023AV000871
—Donald Wuebbles, Editor, AGU Advances