Dataset Information

Atmospheric observations show accurate reporting and little growth in India's methane emissions.

ABSTRACT: Changes in tropical wetland, ruminant or rice emissions are thought to have played a role in recent variations in atmospheric methane (CH4) concentrations. India has the world's largest ruminant population and produces ~?20% of the world's rice. Therefore, changes in these sources could have significant implications for global warming. Here, we infer India's CH4 emissions for the period 2010-2015 using a combination of satellite, surface and aircraft data. We apply a high-resolution atmospheric transport model to simulate data from these platforms to infer fluxes at sub-national scales and to quantify changes in rice emissions. We find that average emissions over this period are 22.0 (19.6-24.3) Tg?yr-1, which is consistent with the emissions reported by India to the United Framework Convention on Climate Change. Annual emissions have not changed significantly (0.2?±?0.7?Tg?yr-1) between 2010 and 2015, suggesting that major CH4 sources did not change appreciably. These findings are in contrast to another major economy, China, which has shown significant growth in recent years due to increasing fossil fuel emissions. However, the trend in a global emission inventory has been overestimated for China due to incorrect rate of fossil fuel growth. Here, we find growth has been overestimated in India but likely due to ruminant and waste sectors.India's methane emissions have been quantified using atmospheric measurements to provide an independent comparison with reported emissions. Here Ganesan et al. find that derived methane emissions are consistent with India's reports and no significant trend has been observed between 2010-2015.

SUBMITTER: Ganesan AL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5635116 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Atmospheric observations show accurate reporting and little growth in India's methane emissions.

Ganesan Anita L AL Rigby Matt M Lunt Mark F MF Parker Robert J RJ Boesch Hartmut H Goulding N N Umezawa Taku T Zahn Andreas A Chatterjee Abhijit A Prinn Ronald G RG Tiwari Yogesh K YK van der Schoot Marcel M Krummel Paul B PB

Nature communications 20171010 1

Changes in tropical wetland, ruminant or rice emissions are thought to have played a role in recent variations in atmospheric methane (CH<sub>4</sub>) concentrations. India has the world's largest ruminant population and produces ~ 20% of the world's rice. Therefore, changes in these sources could have significant implications for global warming. Here, we infer India's CH<sub>4</sub> emissions for the period 2010-2015 using a combination of satellite, surface and aircraft data. We apply a high-r ...[more]

PMID: 29018226

Similar Datasets

Project description:Methane (CH4) fluxes from Alaska and other arctic regions may be sensitive to thawing permafrost and future climate change, but estimates of both current and future fluxes from the region are uncertain. This study estimates CH4 fluxes across Alaska for 2012-2014 using aircraft observations from the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) and a geostatistical inverse model (GIM). We find that a simple flux model based on a daily soil temperature map and a static map of wetland extent reproduces the atmospheric CH4 observations at the state-wide, multi-year scale more effectively than global-scale, state-of-the-art process-based models. This result points to a simple and effective way of representing CH4 flux patterns across Alaska. It further suggests that contemporary process-based models can improve their representation of key processes that control fluxes at regional scales, and that more complex processes included in these models cannot be evaluated given the information content of available atmospheric CH4 observations. In addition, we find that CH4 emissions from the North Slope of Alaska account for 24% of the total statewide flux of 1.74 ± 0.44 Tg CH4 (for May-Oct.). Contemporary global-scale process models only attribute an average of 3% of the total flux to this region. This mismatch occurs for two reasons: process models likely underestimate wetland area in regions without visible surface water, and these models prematurely shut down CH4 fluxes at soil temperatures near 0°C. As a consequence, wetlands covered by vegetation and wetlands with persistently cold soils could be larger contributors to natural CH4 fluxes than in process estimates. Lastly, we find that the seasonality of CH4 fluxes varied during 2012-2014, but that total emissions did not differ significantly among years, despite substantial differences in soil temperature and precipitation; year-to-year variability in these environmental conditions did not affect obvious changes in total CH4 fluxes from the state.

Dataset Information

Atmospheric observations show accurate reporting and little growth in India's methane emissions.

Publications

Atmospheric observations show accurate reporting and little growth in India's methane emissions.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets