Scaling Urban Methane Emissions: Utility of Single-Site Measurements in Five Urban Domains
Kimberly L. Mueller, Anna Karion, Israel Lopez-Coto, Julia Marrs, Vineet Yadav, Genevieve Plant, Joseph Pitt, Zachary R. Barkley, James Whetstone
TL;DR
This paper shows how methane emissions in cities can be estimated accurately using a few fixed measurement sites and a statistical method, improving understanding of urban methane sources.
Contribution
A scalable Bayesian framework using single-site methane measurements to estimate urban emissions and identify infrastructure-based predictors.
Findings
Single tower sites can provide robust methane emission estimates for cities.
Residential building volume is a better predictor of emissions than population in some regions.
The method addresses gaps in urban methane monitoring with minimal spatial coverage.
Abstract
Urban methane (CH4) missions remain poorly understood due to limited observational constraints. Most estimates rely on bottom-up inventories based on assumed emission factors and activity data or downscaling methods, which often underestimate emissions, sometimes by a factor of 2 or more in United States and European cities. While satellite and mobile observations can improve understanding, they face limitations in spatial resolution, coverage, and frequency. In contrast, fixed in situ measurements calibrated to World Meteorological Organization standards offer high precision continuous data, although with limited spatial coverage due to logistical constraints. This study uses in situ observations from single tower sites in five northeastern United States cities to estimate total urban CH4 emissions using a Bayesian scaling factor framework. Despite limited spatial sampling, the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAtmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics · Atmospheric chemistry and aerosols · Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations