Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and – just like carbon dioxide – is increasing its concentration in the atmosphere.It’s not been a steady rise, however. Indeed, during the early s, the amount of the gas even stabilized for a while. But then the concentration jumped in about 2011, with a further uptick recorded in (**********************************.
CH4 (methane) is now climbing rapidly and today stands at just over 1, (parts per billion by volume.
There’s currently a debate about the likely sources, with emissions from human activities such as agriculture and fossil-fuel use undoubtedly in the mix. But there is a large natural component as well, and a lot of current research is centred on contributions from the tropics.
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Believing the region called the Sudd could be the culprit (soil microbes in wetlands are known to produce a lot of methane), the team started looking through other satellite data-sets to make the link.
Land surface temperature observations supported the idea that soils in the region had become wetter; gravity measurements across East Africa also detected an increase in the weight of water held in the ground; and satellite altimeters had tracked changes in the height of lakes and rivers to the south.“The levels of the East” African lakes, which feed down the Nile to the Sudd, increased considerably over the period we were studying. It coincided with the increase in methane that we saw, and would imply that we were getting this increased flow down the river into the wetlands, ” Dr Mark Lunt.
The Edinburgh grouppublished its findings on Wednesday in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
, and, as an update to the story, Dr Lunt is presenting new data here at the American Geophysical Union meeting.He’s been looking atmethane observations made by the EU’s Sentinel-5P satellite. Its Tropomi instrument sees CH4 at a finer resolution than GOSAT, and it’s clear from the European mapper that methane emissions are still elevated over South Sudan. The level of activity is nothing like the same as in the early 2010 s, but the Sudd wetlands remain an important source.
“It’s a huge area so it’s not surprising that it’s pumping out a lot of methane. To give context – the Sudd is (************************************************, 19 sq km: two times the size of Wales. And being that big we expect to see the emissions from space, “Dr Lunt told BBC News.
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