14 DAY TRIAL // Officials with the European Space Agency (ESA) announce that they will next year start an in-depth campaign to monitor the amounts of methane that appear to be missing from Earth's atmosphere. At the forefront of this investigation will be the Tropospheric Ozone Monitoring Instrument (Tropomi) aboard the ESA Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite, which is currently scheduled for launch in 2015.
The mission, valued at around €45 million ($62 million), will seek to determine if the latest analysis released by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has any merit. The document, a meta-analysis of other methane studies, suggests that the actual amount of gas released into the atmosphere may be between 25 and 75 percent higher than experts estimate.
The high-precision Earth observation satellite ESA launches next year will produce data that is sufficiently accurate to either confirm or infirm the results EPA scientists published in the latest issue of the top journal Science. The meta-analysis comes on the heels of multiple other researches suggesting methane emissions may be severely underestimated globally.
Given the vast influence that CH4 gas has on global warming and climate change, any error in numbers reported officially could have significant repercussions for both our understanding of the climate and for developing new and improved energy policies. Methane is around 30 times more efficient at heating up the planet than carbon dioxide (CO2), the most important greenhouse gas out there today.
“The total from our atmospheric measurements does not equal the sum of the parts counted in the inventories. We need to look at whether there are line items that are underestimated by the inventories, or missing entirely,” explains EPA remote sensing and inverse modeling expert Anna Michalak. She is also one of the coauthors on the Science paper.
The Tropomi instrument was developed as a direct successor of the assets that flew aboard ESA's Envisat spacecraft, the largest commercial satellite ever launched in Earth's orbit. Tropomi is estimated to be about 10 times more sensitive to methane emissions than its predecessor, IEEE Spectrum reports.
This means “that you can see sources of methane on the subcity level,” explains Tropomi instrument scientist Johan de Vries, from manufacturer Dutch Space. Daily measurements will be collected at a resolution level of 7 by 7 kilometers (4.3 by 4.3 miles).
The upcoming mission will for the first time reveal in high detail which state and which industry is responsible for releasing the highest amount of methane in the atmosphere. At the same time, the spacecraft will reveal just how much of the gas is released by livestock such as cattle.