Proposal of mep (methane emission presumptuion) method to investigate methane sources

The SCIAMACHY instrument on the European Space Agency satellite ENVISAT measured greenhouse gases in the troposphere and stratosphere. In this study, the CH
₄
source area is extracted by estimating the concentrations of methane emissions from time-series satellite data. Contamination of the data by cloud is interpolated both spatially and temporally. It is assumed that methane emission is negligible over ocean and that the concentration in the ocean area is due to advection from land. Background CH
₄
concentration on land was defined as the ocean CH
₄
concentration at the same latitude. Land CH
₄
emission concentrations show that areas of concentrated high CH
₄
emission are not in paddy fields only but also in broadleaf evergreen areas in South America and Central Africa.