Satellite-Based Monitoring of Methane Emissions from China’s Rice Hub

Rice cultivation is one of the major anthropogenic methane sources in China and globally. However, accurately quantifying regional rice methane emissions is often challenging due to highly heterogeneous emission fluxes and limited measurement data. This study attempts to address this issue by quantifying regional methane emissions from rice cultivation with a high-resolution inversion of satellite methane observations from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI). We apply the method to the largest rice-producing province (Heilongjiang) in China for 2021. Our satellite-based estimation finds a rice methane emission of 0.85 (0.69-1.03) Tg a