A new study has been published on Nature Communications that includes the methane concentrations measured at the RSE monitoring station at Plateu Rosa. The study, titled ““Isotopic constraints in methane inversions reveal larger trends in wetland emissions with improved linkage to terrestrial water storage”, aims at accurately separating the contributions of different sources to recent atmospheric methane (CH4) growth, which is crucial for better quantifying the present and future responses of CH4 emissions to changing climate and anthropogenic activity.

In this study atmospheric inversions has been applied to assess global and regional CH4 emissions from microbial, fossil and pyrogenic sources from 2000 to 2022, using measurements of atmospheric CH4, including our record at Plateau Rosa, and its stable carbon isotope ratio (13C:12C). We confirm that global total CH4 emissions has increased by 15% from 2000 to 2022, with dominated contribution from microbial emissions.

Inversions constrained only by CH4 observations did not capture the decline in fossil emissions during 2020–2022, a decline potentially related to the COVID-19 pandemic, policy-driven changes, and decreases in CH4 emissions intensity, highlighting the critical role of isotopic measurements in independently verifying changes in fossil emissions.

Further, the inversion using isotopic constraints estimates a more prominent increase in wetland emissions that is 20–30% more strongly correlated with variations in terrestrial water storage during 2003–2022. This demonstrates the importance of climate-driven natural sources in explaining long-term CH4 growth and the need of reducing anthropogenic emissions to limit climate change and so the intensification of these natural emissions.

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