Our first objective will be to quantify annual methane emissions in major US urban regions with focus on landfills and gas distribution. This will use a new capability for analytical inversions at…

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has awarded a $836,540 grant to President and Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard University) to quantify annual methane emissions in major U.S. urban regions, evaluate emissions from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) greenhouse gas inventory and reporting program, and develop a high-resolution global bottom-up inventory for rice emissions. This grant, identified as award number 80NSSC25K7208, will fund a multi-year research project with an ultimate completion date of October 17, 2027. The award does not have a set-aside designation. Through this grant, Harvard University will leverage its expertise in atmospheric science, remote sensing, and greenhouse gas monitoring to provide data and analysis to support national and international efforts to mitigate methane emissions.

Our first objective will be to quantify annual methane emissions in major US urban regions with focus on landfills and gas distribution. This will use a new capability for analytical inversions at 12 12 KM2 resolution, and an independent quantification of emissions from large landfills with wind-rotated and oversampled tropomi data. Results will be used to evaluate emissions from the EPA greenhouse gas inventory (ghgi) and the greenhouse gas reporting program (ghgrp), with the goal of guiding improvements in these inventories. Our second objective will be to quantify annual national anthropogenic emissions worldwide with up to 25-KM resolution and attribution to source sectors. This will serve the considerable stakeholder demand for top-down information to evaluate and improve the bottom-up inventories reported by individual countries to the unfccc under the paris agreement and the global methane pledge. We will tile the world with continental-scale inversions covering almost all countries in the world. We will use the results to determine how emission factors for different sectors vary between countries and the implications for policies to mitigate methane emissions. Our third objective will be to develop a global bottom-up inventory for rice emissions with high spatial resolution and monthly temporal resolution by using a new 30-m landsat data product for inundated vegetation together with cropland information.