EDUCATION: GLOBAL METHANE INVENTORY

Your Contribution to Methane Research

Dear Teachers and Students,

I'd really like to let students and teachers know about our research on the global methane cycle. One reason is that our research is related to current scientific news about global warming, as well as political news like the Kyoto Protocol, which was a set of plans designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally. The second reason is that students and their teachers have already made major contributions to our research over the last several years and can continue to contribute in the future.

Even though carbon dioxide is the focus of a substantial amount of press coverage about global warming, methane is also a very powerful greenhouse gas. Its role in global warming over the last hundred years is equal to about 40% of the impact from carbon dioxide. About 70% of the world's annual methane emissions come from human activities such as cultivation of irrigated rice, raising animals such as cattle, and using fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. The reason that students and teachers were able to contribute so much to our research is that estimating methane emissions from these human activities requires locating and checking large amounts of data for every methane source and every country.

Examples of the kind of data we need are areas of flooded rice cultivation, numbers of cattle, amounts of coal mined, and amounts of natural gas produced and consumed. Students have provided a great deal of good-quality data for this research, but there is always a need for more data. For example, a lot of information is available for whole countries, but we are interested in trying to find information for smaller regions within a country, such as states of India and Brazil, or provinces of Canada and China. Atmospheric chemists for their atmospheric modeling need this smaller regional information. In addition, because we want to understand what is controlling the amount of methane in the atmosphere where it operates as a greenhouse gas, we need to know how individual methane sources have changed from year to year for the last 20 years. That means we need to obtain these large amounts of data for each year.

You and your students can help in our quest by getting involved in the research projects provided in these webpages. Your data and results can be can be posted on your web site and we will link to you or you can e-mail them to us to be posted on the GISS/ICP web site. I hope you will take this opportunity to assist in our efforts to understand the methane cycle and its affect on global warming.

Sincerely,
Elaine Matthews
GISS Research Scientist
ematthews@giss.nasa.gov
Fax: (212) 678-5552

Methane Home, Intro, Lessons, Projects
Previous Research, Reference, Feedback