Quantifying Methane Fluxes Simply and Accurately: The Tracer Dilution Method

Methane is an important atmospheric constituent with a wide variety of sources, both natural and anthropogenic, including wetlands and other water bodies, permafrost, farms, landfills, and areas with significant petrochemical exploration, drilling, transport, or processing, or refining occurs. Despite its importance to the carbon cycle, its significant impact as a greenhouse gas, and its ubiquity in modern life as a source of energy, its sources and sinks in marine and terrestrial ecosystems are only poorly understood. This is largely because high quality, quantitative measurements of methane fluxes in these different environments have not been available, due both to the lack of robust field-deployable instrumentation as well as to the fact that most significant sources of methane extend over large areas (from 10’s to 1,000,000’s of square meters) and are heterogeneous emitters – i.e., the methane is not emitted evenly over the area in question. Quantifying the total methane emissions from such sources becomes a tremendous challenge, compounded by the fact that atmospheric transport from emission point to detection point can be highly variable.