MAGIC4AMPAC = Monitoring of Atmospheric composition and Greenhouse gases through multi-Instruments Campaigns for (4) Arctic Methane and Permafrost Challenge
Goal
Analyses of methane measurements from two campaigns in Lapland
Methane is about 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas on a 100-year time scale. Anthropogenic sources of methane contribute about a quarter of current human-induced global warming. Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of about nine years, i.e. much shorter than the other major long-lived greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. Together, these characteristics mean that reducing methane emissions would allow effective mitigation of climate change on decadal time scales.
Global methane emissions with uncertainties.
Lapland in summer is a methane emissions hotspot and dominated almost exclusively by natural emissions, making it a prime region in Europe to study especially peatland emissions. Uncertainties are large, due to differences between bottom-up and top-down estimates, amongst others. (Graphics modified from M. Saunois et al., 2020: "The global methane budget 2000-2017", Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 12, 1561-1623)
The distinction between anthropogenic and natural sources of methane is somewhat artificial, as most natural sources are affected by human activities. A prime example of anthropogenically modified natural sources is permafrost thawing. Permafrost stores twice the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere, and the Arctic is warming particularly fast due to climate change. The feedback associated with rising temperatures, thawing permafrost and methane release represents a potential tipping point in the Earth's climate system. Other sources of the greenhouse gas methane in northern Scandinavia include the oil and gas industry, but strong natural sources dominate. In wetlands, peat bogs, lakes and ponds, methane is produced by organic decomposition processes. These natural processes depend, for example, on temperature and water saturation, therefore on climate and also on human-induced climate change.
Inventories and models of natural methane emissions in the high northern latitudes differ, sometimes significantly. One source of uncertainty is illustrated by the cover image: small-scale landscape heterogeneity is a challenge, for example the extent of lakes and ponds versus different wetland types. Such uncertainties mainly affect bottom-up approaches, which relate microbial processes to landscape features to meteorological parameters to emissions, which ultimately go into climate models. Top-down approaches are complementary. They are based on measurements of atmospheric methane concentrations and relate these to emission fluxes at the surface. Uncertainties in top-down estimates depend primarily on data coverage, which is still poor for methane measurements at high northern latitudes. This is due to limited accessibility and challenges for passive satellite sensors, which have to cope with high solar zenith angles and difficult surface and thermodynamic conditions. To summarise: The high northern latitudes are an important but poorly understood contributor to the global methane budget.
Project
Flights of the three research aircraft at MAGIC-2021.
The Arctic Methane and Permafrost Challenge (AMPAC) is a transatlantic initiative by NASA and ESA to facilitate activities such as community building, workshops and training, gap analysis, data collection and sharing, benchmarking, advancing Earth observation products, reconciling bottom-up and top-down approaches, joint campaigns, and preparation of future missions. MAGIC is a French initiative and stands for Monitoring of Atmospheric composition and Greenhouse gases through multi-Instruments Campaigns .
The ESA-funded MAGIC4AMPAC project addresses the sparse data coverage in the high northern latitudes by focusing on selected airborne observations from two separate field campaigns that took place simultaneously in Lapland: MAGIC-2021and HEMERA-2021. The project is organised in tasks for data provision, satellite evaluation, instrument intercomparison, analyses of methane distributions and fluxes.
The project has a strong methodological component. Instrumentation and measurement strategies of the research aircraft in MAGIC-2021 were partly new and experimental. Wetlands are areal methane sources, which poses completely different challenges for measurements and analyses than the point sources previously considered by the participating groups. The lessons learnt from MAGIC-2021 within MAGIC4AMPAC will contribute significantly to the improvement or new development of instruments, measurement strategies and analyses. This is also relevant for the estimation of emissions from other areal sources, e.g. agriculture (e.g. GHGMon) or lakes.
MAGIC4AMPAC is closely linked to the MAGIC consortium and brings together groups from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Jülich Research Centre (FZJ), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and King's College London (KCL).
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Contact
Dr. Anke Roiger
Head of Department
Institute of Atmospheric Physics
Atmospheric Trace Species
Münchener Straße 20, 82234 Oberpfaffenhofen-Wessling
