Atmospheric methane

About: Atmospheric methane is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2034 publications have been published within this topic receiving 119616 citations.

Modeling regional to global CH4 emissions of boreal and arctic wetlands

Abstract: Methane (CH4) emission from boreal, arctic and subarctic wetlands constitutes a potentially positive feedback to global climate warming. Many process-based models have been developed, but high uncertainties remain in estimating the amount of CH4 released from wetlands at the global scale. This study tries to improve estimates of CH4 emissions by up-scaling a wetland CH4 emission model, PEATLAND-VU, to the global scale with a spatial resolution of 0.5 degrees for the period 2001-2006. This up-scaling was based on the global circum-arctic distribution of wetlands with hydrological conditions being specified by a global hydrological model, PCR-GLOBWB. In addition to the daily hydrological output from PCR-GLOBWB, comprising water table depths and snow thickness, the parameterization included air temperature as obtained from the ECMWF Operational Archive. To establish the uncertainty in the representations of the circum-arctic distribution of wetlands on the CH4 emission, several existing products were used to aggregate the emissions. Using the description of potential peatlands from the FAO Digital Soil Map of the World and the representation of floodplains by PCR-GLOBWB, the average annual flux over the period 2001-2006 was estimated to be 78 Tg yr(-1). In comparison, the six-year average CH4 fluxes were 37.7, 89.4, 145.6, and 157.3 Tg yr(-1) for different estimates of wetland extends based on the studies by Matthews and Fung, Prigent et al., Lehner and Doll, and Kaplan, respectively. This study shows the feasibility to estimate interannual variations in CH4 emissions by coupling hydrological and CH4 emission process models. It highlights the importance of an adequate understanding of hydrology in quantifying the total emissions from northern hemispheric wetlands and shows how knowledge of the sub-grid variability in wetland extent helps to prescribe relevant hydrological conditions to the emission model as well as to identify the uncertainty associated with existing wetland distributions. (Less)

Low Upper Limit to Methane Abundance on Mars

Abstract: By analogy with Earth, methane in the Martian atmosphere is a potential signature of ongoing or past biological activity. During the past decade, Earth-based telescopic observations reported “plumes” of methane of tens of parts per billion by volume (ppbv), and those from Mars orbit showed localized patches, prompting speculation of sources from subsurface bacteria or nonbiological sources. From in situ measurements made with the Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) on Curiosity using a distinctive spectral pattern specific to methane, we report no detection of atmospheric methane with a measured value of 0.18 ± 0.67 ppbv corresponding to an upper limit of only 1.3 ppbv (95% confidence level), which reduces the probability of current methanogenic microbial activity on Mars and limits the recent contribution from extraplanetary and geologic sources.

Microseepage in drylands: Flux and implications in the global atmospheric source/sink budget of methane

Abstract: Drylands are considered a net sink for atmospheric methane and a main item of the global inventories of the greenhouse gas budget. It is outlined here, however, that a significant portion of drylands occur over sedimentary basins hosting natural gas and oil reservoirs, where gas migration to the surface takes place, producing positive fluxes of methane into the atmosphere. New field surveys, in different hydrocarbon-prone basins, confirm that microseepage, enhanced by faults and fractures in the rocks, overcomes the methanotrophic consumption occurring in dry soil throughout large areas, especially in the winter season. Fluxes of a few units to some tens of mg m − 2 day − 1 are frequent over oil–gas fields, whose global extent is estimated at 3.5–4.2 million km 2 ; higher fluxes (> 50 mg m − 2 day − 1 ) are primarily, but not exclusively, found in basins characterized by macro-seeps. Microseepage may however potentially exist over a wider area (∼ 8 million km 2 , i.e. 15% of global drylands), including the Total Petroleum Systems, coal measures and portions of sedimentary basins that have experienced thermogenesis. Based on a relatively large and geographically dispersed data-set (563 measurements) from different hydrocarbon-prone basins in USA and Europe, upscaling suggests that global microseepage emission exceeding 10 Tg year − 1 is very likely. Microseepage is then only one component of a wider class of geological sources, including mud volcanoes, seeps, geothermal and marine seepage, which cannot be ignored in the atmospheric methane budget.

Modeling the fate of methane hydrates under global warming

Abstract: Large amounts of methane hydrate locked up within marine sediments are vulnerable to climate change. Changes in bottom water temperatures may lead to their destabilization and the release of methane into the water column or even the atmosphere. In a multimodel approach, the possible impact of destabilizing methane hydrates onto global climate within the next century is evaluated. The focus is set on changing bottom water temperatures to infer the response of the global methane hydrate inventory to future climate change. Present and future bottom water temperatures are evaluated by the combined use of hindcast high-resolution ocean circulation simulations and climate modeling for the next century. The changing global hydrate inventory is computed using the parameterized transfer function recently proposed by Wallmann et al. (2012). We find that the present-day world's total marine methane hydrate inventory is estimated to be 1146Gt of methane carbon. Within the next 100years this global inventory may be reduced by ∼0.03% (releasing ∼473Mt methane from the seafloor). Compared to the present-day annual emissions of anthropogenic methane, the amount of methane released from melting hydrates by 2100 is small and will not have a major impact on the global climate. On a regional scale, ocean bottom warming over the next 100years will result in a relatively large decrease in the methane hydrate deposits, with the Arctic and Blake Ridge region, offshore South Carolina, being most affected.