Methane's concentration in the atmosphere might be outweighed and outlasted by the more bountiful CO2, but this greenhouse gas is perfectly capable of doing some damage while it's up there. Due to its superior radiation-trapping abilities, methane presents a much more potent threat to the climate than CO2 does pound-for-pound, so monitoring the source of methane emissions is therefore pretty important. And it looks like we might have a new tool at our disposal, with NASA announcing the first observation of a single methane leak on our planet's surface from an Earth-orbiting spacecraft.
In October 2015, workers at the Aliso Canyon gas facility discovered a massive leak stemming from one of the site's wells. The disaster spewed more than 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere before it could be plugged the following February, with researchers estimating the impact to the climate to be equivalent to the annual emissions from half a million cars.
While all this was happening, NASA's Earth Observing (EO-1) satellite was floating somewhere overhead in low-Earth orbit, as it had done since launching in 2000. EO-1 was only scheduled to fly for one year with its primary mission to demonstrate new land-imaging instruments, one of which was the first-of-its kind Hyperion spectrometer capable of showing the land-surface in more than 220 spectral colors.
As part of an investigation into the gas leak, NASA scientists had EO-1 direct its gaze toward the Aliso Canyon site, where Hyperion detected the plumes of methane belching from the site on three separate overpasses during the winter of 2015-16. These observations were backed up by measurements taken a little closer to Earth, aboard NASA's ER-2 aircraft carrying the agency's Airborne/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer.
"This is the first time the methane emissions from a single facility have been observed from space," says David R. Thompson, research scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The percentage of atmospheric methane produced through human activities remains poorly understood. Future instruments with much greater sensitivity on orbiting satellites can help resolve this question by surveying the biggest sources around the world, so that we can better understand and address this unknown factor in greenhouse gas emissions."
With its significant supply of Earth-facing satellites and aircraft, NASA has emerged as an important resource for monitoring the planet's health in the face of a changing climate. From revealing how mounting CO2 is turning the globe an undesirable shade of green to picking up on undetected sources of dangerous toxic sulfur dioxide emissions, the work of NASA mightn't be as important in getting us to Mars as it is in one day preventing a forced migration.
Source: NASA
"Due to its superior radiation-trapping abilities" ??? it doesn't "trap radiation" it absorbs it and then re-emits it ... it slows it down, not traps it ...
"NASA has emerged as an important resource for monitoring the planet's health in the face of a changing climate. " Of course the climate is changing ... it has never stopped changing and never will ... your implication is that it is changing for the worse and that is simply not true ...
Before you permit yourself to get all scare-defied over more methane being released into the atmosphere, and even if you buy into recent (since WWII) surface temperature rise being as a result of increased greenhouse gasses, do your research and find that methane is an irrelevant gas in the theoretical causes because of the limited bands of energy from which it can possibly absorb and from those two bands upon which it can act, it must share that potential with one more prevalent, which has already done the job almost completely in those bands leaving nothing much for methane to work upon. Those who promote gloom & doom from impending release of stores of methane wrongly assume the gas would have unlimited stores of energy upon which it could draw to heat the planet should that release occur. Therein lies the failure of this sub-theory even assuming such release is possible and imminent. There is no such pool of energy.
The energy beamed by the sun comes to Earth in the form of short waves, is absorbed by the planet, and some is transmitted back to space in the form of long waves in various bands of energy. Warmists' Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory holds that greenhouse gasses intercept by absorption and transmit back to Earth a percentage of the long wave radiation energy in natural balance until humans destroy the balance by over supplying unnatural amounts of greenhouse gasses by which such process and added heat causes more of the principle greenhouse gas, water vapor, to be produced accelerating the process in an ever heightening loop of heating Gaia. Methane is a "greenhouse gas." The misnamed process acts nothing like a greenhouse, BTW, and empirical measurements, the acid test of science, do not reflect water vapor increasing as required in proportion to CO2 increases or even out of proportion. No increase of water vapor at all in fact has been measured among the several failures of the theory to be sustained by empirical measurement.
Methane (CH4) by its physical properties has only two narrow absorption bands at 3.3 microns and 7.5 microns in the overall broad electro-magnetic spectrum from which it can absorb energy. Theoretically, CH4 is 20 times more effective an absorber than CO2 – in those bands in a laboratory. However, CH4 is only 0.00017% (1.7 parts per million) of the atmosphere. Moreover, both of its bands occur at wavelengths where H2O is already absorbing virtually all energy. Because water vapor is much more plentiful in the atmosphere than methane (or any other GHG), H2O absorbs vastly more energy and is by far the most important greenhouse gas. On any given day, H2O is a percent or two of the atmosphere (1.0-2.0% or 5,882 to 11,764 times as prevalent as methane in the atmosphere, or 5882÷20=294.1 [or 588.4] multiple the absorber as methane); we call that humidity. Hence, any radiation that CH4 might absorb has already been absorbed by H2O in the only radiation bands methane absorbs energy. Once the energy in a band of the spectrum has been sucked dry, no additional absorptive gas can absorb more. Painting a black window another coat will not keep out more light. In other words, the ratio of the percentages of water to methane is such that the effects of CH4 are completely masked by H2O because the absorption of infrared energy in the bands of the spectrum affected by methane has already been saturated by H2O absorption. The amount of CH4 would have to increase 100-fold to make it comparable to H2O and even then it would no longer matter because water vapor has beat it to the punch.
There is not much ambient energy in those two little short, stray bands of the radiation spectrum to start with and most of that has already been worked over by H2O from time immemorial leaving only the scraps to poor CH4, which can never effect climate to any appreciable or worrisome amount. Because it absorbs energy in a laboratory does not mean it works that way in a chaotic atmosphere with other agents and processes present.
Learn more of what the science neophytes should have investigated before fearing methane, which is an irrelevant greenhouse gas (graphs, observed facts & all that tedious math kind of stuff) —
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/methane-the-irrelevant-greenhouse-gas/
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/01/whit_house_methane_madness.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/10/stop-the-devastation-of-peoples-lives-by-speculating-with-no-data-remembering-cattle-and-methane-emissions/
Methane is fine vehicle to instill fear, the politicians greatest ally, on an uninformed populace though. It is the rare person whose knowledge on the substance reaches even the level of understanding the stuff coming from their gas stove is raw methane much less how it works in the atmosphere...easy targets for manipulation.