Methane Emissions Computed Including Explicit Observational Uncertainty
Reveal Bias, Large Number of Unreliable Pixels
Abstract
This study quantifies methane emissions in clean areas of Western China
using TROPOMI XCH4 observations and a mass conserving method, while
explicitly considering observational uncertainty. All resulting
physically unrealistic emissions values are successfully identified and
filtered using a mixture of a threshold-based approach and a stochastic
approach focused on the impacts of the pixel-by-pixel and day-by-day
XCH4 uncertainty. A resulting minimum emission retrieval value of
0.5-1.8 μg/m²/s is obtained, which is lower than existing minimum
thresholds using TROPOMI. Additionally, our results demonstrate that
there is a 5% emissions bias due to the non-linearity of the gradient
term when the XCH4 contains a 10% error. This method does not randomly
remove negative values and retain positive values, therefore providing
robust and reliable quantification of emissions under conditions of data
uncertainty.