The Methane Detectives: On The Trail Of A Global Warming Mystery
Research chemist Ed Dlugokencky and his colleagues in the Global Monitoring Division catalog the canisters, and then use a series of high-precision tools — a gas chromatograph, a flame ionization detector, sophisticated software — to measure how much carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane each flask contains. As it happens, they are also the biggest source of uncertainty when it comes to the carbon budget, according to Benjamin Poulter, a NASA researcher and contributor to the Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of scientists that publishes one of the most widely cited estimates of the global methane budget. Only three elements of the global methane budget are large enough to be plausible culprits: microbial emissions (from livestock, agriculture, and wetlands); fossil fuel emissions; and the chemical process by which methane is scrubbed from the atmosphere.
Source: undark.org