Methane is a potent but short-lived greenhouse gas, making it an attractive target for climate action: cutting methane emissions could quickly curb global warming in the near term. Understanding how the gas accumulates and is removed from the atmosphere is vital to designing an effective methane mitigation strategy, says Qiang Fu, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington.
Determining the amount of methane is lost from the air through atmospheric processes is a key piece of calculating the methane budget—a global accounting of methane sources and sinks. “We derive the methane loss in the stratosphere using [satellite] observations,” Fu says. This is a new strategy, as researchers calculating methane loss have historically relied on chemistry-based climate models that do not incorporate direct observations.
Satellites can measure the total concentration of methane in the stratosphere, as well as temperature and radiative heating, Fu explains. With these data, it’s relatively straightforward to directly calculate methane loss based on mass conservation, he says. In fact, Fu and his coauthor, Cong Dong, determined that about 49.8Tg of methane was lost annually from 2007-10 using satellite data collected during that period (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2026, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2529774123).
This value is larger than those derived from chemistry-based climate models, which suggests that such models might be missing or underestimating the atmospheric processes responsible for methane loss. “We are always trying to improve the models,” Fu says. Incorporating observational data could help constrain these models and “give us better confidence in the prediction,” he adds.
The results interest climate scientist Shushi Peng of Peking University. They are likely more accurate than the observation-free model-based calculations of stratospheric methane loss, he writes in an email. There are also implications for other important atmospheric species. “Methane acts [as] a crucial sink for the reactive chlorine in the stratosphere,” Peng says. If more methane is reacting with chlorine atoms than previously thought, “we need to refine our predictions for the stratospheric ozone chemistry and recovery,” he says.
Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright ©
2026 American Chemical Society