Articles | Volume 23, issue 8
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-4863-2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-4863-2023
Research article
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25 Apr 2023
Research article | Highlight paper |  | 25 Apr 2023

Methane emissions are predominantly responsible for record-breaking atmospheric methane growth rates in 2020 and 2021

Liang Feng, Paul I. Palmer, Robert J. Parker, Mark F. Lunt, and Hartmut Bösch

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Cited articles

Bloom, A. A., Bowman, K. W., Lee, M., Turner, A. J., Schroeder, R., Worden, J. R., Weidner, R., McDonald, K. C., and Jacob, D. J.: A global wetland methane emissions and uncertainty dataset for atmospheric chemical transport models (WetCHARTs version 1.0), Geosci. Model Dev., 10, 2141–2156, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-2141-2017, 2017. 
Buschmann, M., Petri, C., Palm, M., Warneke, T., and Notholt, J.: TCCON data from Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard (NO), Release GGG2020.R0, Caltech Data [data set], https://doi.org/10.14291/tccon.ggg2020.nyalesund01.R0, 2022. 
Ciavarella, A., Cotterill, D., Stott, P., Kew, S., Philip, S., van Oldenborgh, G. J., Skålevåg, A., Lorenz, P., Robin, Y., Otto, F., Hauser, M., Seneviratne, S. I., Lehner, F., and Zolina, O.: Prolonged Siberian heat of 2020 almost impossible without human influence, Climatic Change, 166, 9, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03052-w, 2021. 
Cooper, M. J., Martin, R. V., Hammer, M. S., Levelt, P. F., Veefkind, P., Lamsal, L. N., Krotkov, N. A., Brook, J. R., and McLinden, C. A.: Global fine-scale changes in ambient NO2 during COVID-19 lockdowns, Nature, 601, 380–387, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04229-0, 2022. 
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Executive editor
After a period of near-zero growth of atmospheric methane, a major greenhouse gas, its growth rates have increased, with values in 2020 and 2021 exceeding all prior values since the beginning of systematic measurements in 1983. This recent acceleration, particularly during the covid-19 years 2020 and 2021, raises the question whether the methane increase was due to stronger sources or reduced sinks in the troposphere. A reduction of the tropospheric abundance of the hydroxyl radical (OH), the reaction of which is the main tropospheric methane sink, could be plausibly explained by global-scale reductions in nitrogen oxides due to pandemic-related industry shutdowns. Using an inversion scheme, Feng et al. demonstrate that such a reduction only accounts for about 34% in 2020 and 10% in 2021 of the observed methane rise. Instead, the authors attribute increased methane emissions to hydrological anomalies and microbial sources over the tropics, i.e., Eastern Africa and tropical South America, and temperate North America. The study demonstrates the importance of simultaneously accounting for changes in methane emissions and sinks for an improved quantitative understanding of the evolution of the methane concentrations to assess the role of greenhouse gases in climate change and tropospheric composition.
Short summary
Our understanding of recent changes in atmospheric methane has defied explanation. Since 2007, the atmospheric growth of methane has accelerated to record-breaking values in 2020 and 2021. We use satellite observations of methane to show that (1) increasing emissions over the tropics are mostly responsible for these recent atmospheric changes, and (2) changes in the OH sink during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown can explain up to 34% of changes in atmospheric methane for that year.
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