Arctic Methane and Permafrost Challenge (AMPAC)

Abstract

What are the current methane emissions in the Arctic and what are the sources and sinks? Will the fraction of the carbon permafrost feedback increase in the future? Why do we see rapid changes in permafrost not followed by a commensurate net rise in methane emissions? What can we learn from the increasing number of satellite observations over the Arctic high latitudes? Answering these questions requires multidisciplinary expertise on observations and modeling of land, cryospheric, biospheric and atmospheric processes. Novel methods are needed to benefit from the latest advances in satellite observations and to combine them in-situ observations to bridge the gap of processes taking place in different spatial and temporal scales. To address these challenges, NASA and ESA have launched in December 2019 a transatlantic Arctic Methane and Permafrost Challenge (AMPAC) to promote interdisciplinary and collaborative research across communities bringing together different data, results and expertise across the Atlantic. So far two meetings have been organized with the multidisciplinary scientific community to discuss the open research questions and challenges in answering them. In this presentation we give an overview of the AMPAC initiative. We discuss how satellite observations of greenhouse gases can bring new insights to the initiative and what are the present challenges in using them for meeting the ultimate goals of AMPAC to better understand, quantify and predict methane emissions from permafrost changes in the Arctic.