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Updated: Jun 9, 2025

Design and Use of a Full Flow Sampling System FFS for the Quantification of Methane Emissions
Published on: June 12, 2016
Rapid shift in methane carbon isotopes suggests microbial emissions drove record high atmospheric methane growth in
Sylvia Englund Michel1,2, Xin Lan3,4, John Miller4
1Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado, Boulder CO 80303.
Abstract:
The growth rate of the atmospheric abundance of methane (CH4) reached a record high of 15.4 ppb yr-1 between 2020 and 2022, but the mechanisms driving the accelerated CH4 growth have so far been unclear. In this work, we use measurements of the 13C:12C ratio of CH4 (expressed as δ13CCH4) from NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network and a box model to investigate potential drivers for the rapid CH4 growth. These measurements show that the record-high CH4 growth in 2020-2022 was accompanied by a sharp decline in δ13CCH4, indicating that the increase in CH4 abundance was mainly driven by increased emissions from microbial sources such as wetlands, waste, and agriculture. We use our box model to reject increasing fossil fuel emissions or decreasing hydroxyl radical sink as the dominant driver for increasing global methane abundance.
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