Atmospheric Methane Emissions Correlate With Natural Gas Consumption From Residential and Commercial Sectors in Los Angeles

Abstract

Legislation in the State of California mandates reductions in emissions of short‐lived climate pollutants of 40% from 2013 levels by 2030 for CH4. Identification of the sector(s) responsible for these emissions and their temporal and spatial variability is a key step in achieving these goals. Here, we determine the emissions of CH4 in Los Angeles from 2011–2017 using a mountaintop remote sensing mapping spectrometer. We show that the pattern of CH4 emissions contains both seasonal and nonseasonal contributions. We find that the seasonal component peaks in the winter and is correlated (R2 = 0.58) with utility natural gas consumption from the residential and commercial sectors and not from the industrial and gas‐fired power plant sectors. The nonseasonal component is (22.9 ± 1.4) Gg CH4/month. If the seasonal correlation is causal, about (1.4 ± 0.1)% of the commercial and residential natural gas consumption in Los Angeles is released into the atmosphere.

Nitrogen Oxide Emissions from U.S. Oil and Gas Production: Recent Trends and Source Attribution

“…The standard deviation of the monthly mean NO 2 VCDs was included as error margin in the regression fits. Multivariate regression and comparable methods have been successfully applied in previous studies (He et al, ; Majid et al, ).…”

Methane Mitigation: Methods to Reduce Emissions, on the Path to the Paris Agreement

“…In the Boston, USA, urban region, McKain et al () reported loss rates to the atmosphere of around 2.7%, as a proportion of the gas used. In the U.S. Los Angeles basin, He et al () found that about 1.4% of commercial and residential gas consumption is released into the air. Such loss rates are expensive, locally potentially dangerous, and an unnecessary greenhouse emission.…”

Measurement report: Long-range transport patterns into the tropical northwest Pacific during the CAMP<sup>2</sup>Ex aircraft campaign: chemical composition, size distributions, and the impact of convection

“…Such transport is controlled by the interplay of several factors such as topography, sea breeze, monsoon flows, and typhoons (Reid et al, 2012;. Aside from the risk posed by trans-ported anthropogenic aerosol on public health (Lelieveld et al, 2015;Zhang et al, 2017), such a diverse set of aerosol sources and types can result in variable aerosol-cloudclimate interactions (Hamid et al, 2001;Heald et al, 2014;Rosenfeld, 1999;Ross et al, 2018;Sorooshian et al, 2009;Yu et al, 2006;Yuan et al, 2011), which are complicated further by the spatial inhomogeneity of transported aerosol particles (Akimoto, 2003). As the influence of aerosol particles on climate remains one of the largest uncertainties in our understanding of the atmosphere (IPCC, 2014), investigating the composition and transport mechanisms of air masses from different source regions will aid in the future development of transport models and lead to a better understanding of the transport pathways that modulate aerosol particles in this part of the world.…”