Using new estimates of methane emissions over Europe to assess how proposed space-borne laser instruments will advance our scientific understanding of methane surface fluxes

Kurzfassung

Laser instruments designed to measure methane from air- and space-borne platforms are being developed at DLR (MERLIN) and at NASA (GSFC Methane Sounder). Designing these instrument with sufficient accuracy to advance our understanding of emission source strengths and locations is crucial. Here we present a model simulation of methane used to test the potential of laser measurements to improve methane source/sink estimates. Our approach uses the FLEXPART lagrangian particle transport model, a global chemistry transport model, and hourly methane measurements from ground-based stations in Europe. We retrieve slowly varying (15 days) source strengths from European wetlands and anthropogenic emission regions from 2008-2011. A by-product of our model is tropospheric methane column amounts, which can be displayed in a movie format as methane weather. We will examine the seasonal horizontal spatial variability in the methane fields and compare with the current proposed accuracy and precision specifications of the laser instrument design.