Tracking Methane Emissions by Satellite
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World Bank, Washington, DC
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Atmospheric methane is a potent
greenhouse gas that has accounted for 23 percent of
radiative forcing in the lower atmosphere since 1750. Since
methane has a much shorter atmospheric duration than carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases, it provides a critical
opportunity for near-term atmospheric greenhouse gas
reduction. Thus, 122 countries have joined the recently
launched Global Methane Pledge to reduce methane emissions
at least 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030. Unfortunately,
the Pledge confronts a serious information problem at the
outset: the near-total absence of directly measured data for
problem diagnosis, program design, and performance
assessment. At present, priority areas for emissions
reduction are identified with spatially formatted
“bottom-up” emissions inventories, such as the Emissions
Database for Global Atmospheric Research, which combines
sectoral activity data with broadly calibrated emissions
factors from engineering studies. This paper addresses the
information problem by introducing a new World Bank database
of monthly atmospheric methane concentrations, calculated
for a high-resolution spatial grid from data provided by the
European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite platform. It
illustrates the potential utility of the database with a
global study of methane emissions from irrigated rice
production, which accounts for about 10 percent of
agricultural methane emissions. A comparative analysis
suggests that the Sentinel-5P data supplement the Emissions
Database for Global Atmospheric Research data with more
fine-grained spatial information, which may support local
programs to track, verify, and reward adoption of
methane-reducing rice production techniques. If this
approach proves valuable for irrigated rice production, it
seems likely to work for other methane sources as well.
Palabras clave
CH4 EMISSIONS, SENTINEL-5P, AGRICULTURAL EMISSIONS, IRRIGATED RICE PRODUCTION, METHANE EMISSIONS, SATELLITE IMAGERY, AGRICULTURE CASE STUDY, GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSION REDUCTION, GLOBAL METHANE PLEDGE