It’s always surprising when you learn that obvious things aren’t being done, or at least aren’t standard. In this case, it’s using the best tools to measure how much methane is coming from landfills. In news that will shock no one, actually measuring this shows that it’s higher than “bottom up modeling” would suggest.

This is a fairly readable paper in Science. Kudos to the authors.

The team behind this paper is the carbon mapper team. The required methane emissions test is someone walking around with a flame ionization detector to find hotspots. The team behind this paper hired aircraft with higher resolution sensors that are designed to spot methane in the air through its impacts.

A key component of their findings relates to higher temporal frequency showing persistent emissions over time.

Anyway, look around the carbon mapper data to see where the methane is coming from nearby you! In our case, it’s from a few landfills. The team behind this is planning to launch a few satellites to improve the temporal resolution of the data (at the cost of reduced detection thresholds)