Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, 80 times more potent at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. In 2014, a California law required statewide methane emissions to be cut by 40% by 2030 from 2013 levels. Currently, the local natural gas utility estimates that methane emissions in the Los Angeles area are decreasing at a rate of about 5.8% per year.
emissions in the region are decreasing at a much slower pace: 1.6% per year over the past decade. The findings indicate that more significant methane reduction efforts are needed to meet target levels.
In the new study, researchers from Caltech and JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, used an instrument called the California Laboratory for Atmospheric Remote Sensing—Fourier Transform Spectrometer . CLARS-FTS overlooks the LA basin from atop Mount Wilson Observatory and scans the atmosphere to identify signatures of the molecules in the air. Over the past decade, it has collected information on fluctuating methane levels every day.
According to the team, this"top-down" approach of measuring methane levels in the atmosphere is much more precise than the"bottom-up" approach of estimating atmospheric levels based on ground-based measurements. With the technique, the researchers found that methane emission reductions had been overestimated: The scans showed that the actual rate of methane emission reduction was five times lower than the gas utility had estimated.
Though the state of California is implementing mitigation methods such as reducing leakage from intrastate transmission and distribution pipelines, the top-down measurement approach shows that more rigorous efforts are needed to meet emissions reductions targets. "This study shows the need for the government to expand a monitoring network throughout more urban regions to precisely measure"As the country's leader in setting environmental standards, the state needs to expand its current work in the measurement, reporting, and verification of natural gas emissions from all sectors of the economy," says study co-author Stanley Sander , senior research scientist at JPL and a visiting associate at Caltech.
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