Tropospheric OH plays a central role in the chemical degradation and formation of air pollutants and climate-relevant trace gases. Traditional direct measurements of the extremely short-lived OH radicals provide localised information on the OH budget. Due to the high technical complexity and scarcity of such measurements, they are practically unsuitable for mapping global spatio-temporal OH distributions. Budget analyses of long-lived tracers (e.g. methyl chloroform) that react exclusively with OH provide estimates of the global mean OH and its temporal variability, but lack spatial resolution. This forward-looking opinion paper discusses new ideas and proposals to constrain global chemical sources and sinks of tropospheric OH using satellite and suborbital observations. The proposed approaches promise a better understanding of the global OH budget at higher spatial and temporal resolution than has been possible to date.