Sign in Subscribe

Down under levels up with top-down panel

Australia gets in on the new approach.

SL Staff B

• 3 min read
Down under levels up with top-down panel
That's the way you do it ... go satellite and aerial to make greenhouse gas modelling consistent.

If you didn't quite catch that, here it is, unpacked:

Australia has created a new and ambitious expert panel on top-down greenhouse gas modelling.1

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you need to be able to find them. We know where carbon dioxide comes from: home heating, transportation, industrial processes ... the usual suspects.

Methane's more difficult to find, though. It comes from landfill, agricultural processes, and fossil fuel industries ... but not always predictably. Is that natural gas pipeline leaking clouds of methane, or is it safely transporting natural gas from place to place? How about that coal mine? That landfill? That huge herd of cattle?

Modellers have tried to answer the question with bottom-up approaches where they figure out the leak potential of all the pieces (in a petroleum plant, for example), add them up, and use that as an emissions estimate.

Trouble is, that rarely works out well. Dozens of studies show that methane leaks are notoriously hard to predict, in some cases being off by as much as a factor of five.2,3,4

The answer turns out to be new, more sophisticated models that build a top-down picture of emissions ... quite literally, since they work from the top of the atmosphere downwards rather than upwards from components on the ground. In other words, they take actual measurements of airborne greenhouse gas emissions using satellites, drones, and aircraft, mostly with spectrometers as principal instruments. And the best of these models combine the bottom-up approach with this new top-down data to produce a very comprehensive picture of emissions.

This is all new stuff: researchers are only now beginning to see how vast the gap is between the bottom-up and top-down models, and how to combine them for greater precision and accuracy.

Australia is getting in on the trend. Its new expert panel will focus on top-down models of coal, oil, and gas emissions with an eye to helping Australia meet its Paris Accord obligations. The panel is headed up by Cathy Foley, Australia's "Chief Scientist", and includes some pretty interesting talent with expertise in remote sensing, satellite data, and emissions modelling.5,6

It's a good, solid step in the fight against climate change.

About Hope

If you look at the top of this web page, you'll notice "HOPE", a menu item that takes you to a series of short articles about victories in the climate fight. This is one of those articles.

People don't have a lot of time. They are inundated with negative news about the environment. While these negative news stories can communicate the seriousness of the situation, they can also convince people to believe that things are hopeless ... and they are not. So each little, digestible bit provides a peek into one tiny little thing that has gone right.

Don't think for a minute, though, that any of these issues are simple. Usually, a whole world of physics, chemistry, policy, and actions undergirds each of these stories. We encourage you to look more deeply, to investigate the references at the end of each article, to take advantage of each little positive window into a bigger, more complex situation.

See below for some reading suggestions.

⚡️

Reading

  1. “Methane Reporting Panel - Climate Control News.” Accessed February 27, 2025. https://www.climatecontrolnews.com.au/refrigeration/methane-reporting-panel.
  2. Erland, Broghan M., Andrew K. Thorpe, and John A. Gamon. “Recent Advances Toward Transparent Methane Emissions Monitoring: A Review.” Environmental Science & Technology 56, no. 23 (December 6, 2022): 16567–81. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c02136.
  3. CutMethane.ca. “Published Research on Canada’s Methane Emissions.” Accessed March 1, 2025. https://cutmethane.ca/published-research/.
  4. “UK Substantially Underestimates Its Methane Emissions from Oil and Gas Production – and Many Other Countries Probably Do Too | Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE).” Accessed March 1, 2025. https://cpree.princeton.edu/news/2023/uk-substantially-underestimates-its-methane-emissions-oil-and-gas-production.
  5. “Expert Panel on Fugitive Methane Emissions: Terms of Reference - DCCEEW,” February 21, 2025. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/about/news/expert-panel-fugitive-methane-emissions-tor.
  6. “Chief Scientist Cathy Foley to Lead Expert Methane Reporting Panel | Ministers.” Accessed February 27, 2025. https://minister.dcceew.gov.au/bowen/media-releases/chief-scientist-cathy-foley-lead-expert-methane-reporting-panel.

Sign up for more like this.

Enter your email
Subscribe