New methane concentration technologies for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions

Methane concentrations in the atmosphere have more than doubled over the last 150 years and mitigation of methane emissions will play a vital role in enabling climate change mitigation strategies. Understanding current and future methane inventories at a regional scale will be a key element in developing and implementing successful solutions. Current regional scale isotopic methane data is not available at a high enough frequency to enable comparison to the models that are used to derive national emission estimates. In order to improve these current data sets, more in-situ measurements of methane isotopic data are required and current techniques do not provide the required sensitivity and frequency.