Giving Compass' Take:

• New research uses data science to determine how much methane goes from the ocean and into the atmosphere each year.

• How can funders work to ensure that there's adequate research on methane emissions? What stakeholders need to be involved in the decisionmaking and execution of climate actions? 

• Here's an article on reducing methane emissions from oil and gas in North America. 

To predict the impacts of human emissions, researchers need a complete picture of the atmosphere’s methane cycle. They need to know the size of the inputs—both natural and human—as well as the outputs. They also need to know how long methane resides in the atmosphere.

The results, published in Nature Communications, fill a longstanding gap in methane cycle research and will help climate scientists better assess the extent of human perturbations.

Every three years, an international group of climate scientists called the Global Carbon Project updates what is known as the methane budget. The methane budget reflects the current state of understanding of the inputs and outputs in the global methane cycle. Its last update was in 2016.

“The methane budget helps us place human methane emissions in context and provides a baseline against which to assess future changes,” says Tom Weber, assistant professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester. “In past methane budgets, the ocean has been a very uncertain term. We know the ocean naturally releases methane to the atmosphere, but we don’t necessarily know how much.”

Read the full article on ocean methane by Lindsey Valich at Futurity.