Greenhouse Gas Emission Monitoring and Modelling

Greenhouse gas emission monitoring and modelling encompass techniques to quantify, track and predict the release of gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. Monitoring employs both ground-based networks and space-borne sensors to acquire concentration data, while modelling integrates these observations with physical and chemical process representations to estimate fluxes and project future trends. Bottom-up approaches compile activity data and emission factors to produce inventories, whereas top-down methods use atmospheric measurements and inverse modelling to infer emissions at regional to global scales. The combination of high-resolution satellite retrievals, enhanced in situ networks and coupled Earth-system models has markedly improved our understanding of emission sources, sinks and feedbacks. These advances inform mitigation policies by revealing under-reported sources, quantifying the efficacy of interventions and refining projections under different climatic and socioeconomic scenarios.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have employed high-resolution satellite inversion techniques to refine national methane inventories from fossil fuel exploitation. Observations from methane-sensitive spectrometers have been used to constrain emissions from oil, gas and coal operations, revealing that several major emitters under-report by up to 30 % compared with official submissions. These analyses demonstrate the power of combining tens of months of methane column data with atmospheric transport models to achieve sub-50 km resolution estimates and to identify emission intensities that exceed global averages by factors of two or more. Parallel work on wetland methane feedbacks has utilised process-based wetland modelling driven by climatic and hydrological data to show an accelerating response of natural wetland emissions to recent warming. Model ensembles indicate that emissions during the last two decades have grown at a faster rate than previously recognised, underscoring the need for sustained flux observations and improved representation of inundation dynamics in Earth-system models.

Greenhouse Gas Emission Monitoring and Modelling publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in greenhouse gas emission monitoring and modelling across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Bottom-up approach: Compilation of emissions from known sources using activity data and emission factors.

Top-down inversion: Estimation of emissions by matching atmospheric concentration observations with transport model simulations.

Emission factor: Quantity of greenhouse gas emitted per unit of activity (e.g., fuel consumed).

Flux: Rate of gas exchange between the surface and the atmosphere, often expressed in mass per area per time.

Atmospheric transport model: Numerical simulation of gas movement and dispersion in the atmosphere driven by meteorology.

Wetland methane feedback: Positive response of methane emissions from water-saturated soils to climatic warming.

References

1. Likely substantial underestimation of reported methane emissions from United Kingdom upstream oil and gas activities. Energy & Environmental Science (2023).
2. National quantifications of methane emissions from fuel exploitation using high resolution inversions of satellite observations. Nature Communications (2023).
3. Recent intensification of wetland methane feedback. Nature Climate Change (2023).
4. Ongoing CO2 monitoring verify CO2 emissions and sinks in China during 2018–2021. Science Bulletin (2023).
5. EDGAR v4.3.2 Global Atlas of the three major greenhouse gas emissions for the period 1970–2012. Earth System Science Data (2019).