Meeting the Challenges of Characterizing Methane Emissions

This report outlines actions to improve estimates of the amounts of anthropogenic methane emitted in the United States and to improve the utility and usability of methane emission inventories to governments, industries, academia, nongovernmental organizations, and the general public. Atmospheric observations are fed into atmospheric inverse models to compute emission fluxes, called the “top-down” approach to emission estimation. The more familiar “bottom-up” approach is based on scaling up of data for emissions by individual components or facilities.Top-down and bottom-up approaches can be tested against each other to improve the application of both approaches.