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Trends in the seasonal amplitude of atmospheric methane

Nature volume 641, pages 660–665 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Methane is an important greenhouse gas1 and its atmospheric concentration has almost tripled since pre-industrial times2,3,4. Atmospheric methane mixing ratios vary seasonally, with the seasonal cycle amplitude (SCA) having decreased in northern high latitudes and increased in the subtropics and tropics since the 1980s5,6. These opposing SCA trends can help understanding of long-term changes in the global methane budget, as methane emissions and sinks have opposing effects on the SCA5. However, trends in the methane SCA have not yet been explored in detail5,6. Here we use a suite of atmospheric transport model simulations and attribute the observed trends in the seasonal amplitude of methane to changes in emissions and the atmospheric sink from reaction with the hydroxyl radical (OH). We find that the decreasing amplitude in the northern high latitudes is mainly caused by an increase in natural emissions (such as wetlands) owing to a warmer climate, adding evidence to previous studies suggesting a positive climate feedback7,8,9. In contrast, the enhanced methane amplitude in the subtropics and tropics is mainly attributed to strengthened OH oxidation. Our results provide independent evidence for an increase in tropospheric OH concentration10,11 of 10 ± 1% since 1984, which together with an increasing atmospheric methane concentration suggests a 21 ± 1% increase in the atmospheric methane sink.

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Fig. 1: Long-term changes in seasonal CH4 amplitude at Barrow, Mauna Loa and the South Pole.
Fig. 2: Attribution of changes in seasonal CH4 amplitude.
Fig. 3: The anomaly in tropospheric OH concentration and index of global NOx and CO emissions.

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Data availability

All observation and model data that support the findings of this study are available as follows. The site-level atmospheric CH4 concentration data are obtained from https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/. The aircraft data of CH4 concentration are obtained from https://gml.noaa.gov/aftp/data/trace_gases/ch4/pfp/aircraft/. The EDGAR v7.0 data are downloaded from https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset_ghg70. The CEDS 2021 data are downloaded from https://data.pnnl.gov/dataset/CEDS-4-21-21. The BB4CMIP data are downloaded from https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/input4mips/. The GFED v4.1s data are obtained from https://www.geo.vu.nl/~gwerf/GFED/GFED4/. The wetland emissions from ORCHIDEE are available from ref. 7. The CAMS wetland emissions data are downloaded from https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/cams-greenhouse-gas-ghg-flux-inversions. The LPJ-EOSIM wetland emissions data are downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5067/Community/LPJ-EOSIM/LPJ_EOSIM_L2_MCH4E.001. The LMDZ-INCA OH concentration data are available from ref. 7. The OH fields simulated by Earth system models are downloaded from https://esgf-data.dkrz.de/search/cmip6-dkrz/. The MERRA-2 hourly climate forcing data are obtained from https://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/reanalysis/MERRA-2. The monthly temperature and precipitation from CRU TS v4.05 are downloaded from https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/cru_ts_4.05. The MSWEP monthly precipitation data are downloaded from http://www.gloh2o.org/mswep. The monthly temperature, precipitation and soil temperature from ERA5 reanalysis data are downloaded from https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5. The GLEAM v3.8a monthly root-zone soil moisture data are downloaded from https://www.gleam.eu. The GEOS-Chem simulated surface and tropospheric CH4 concentrations and OH concentrations are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28425077. Details are shown in Supplementary Table 2. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The community-led GEOS-Chem model of atmospheric chemistry and transport is maintained centrally by Harvard University (https://geoschem.github.io/) and is open access at https://github.com/geoschem/geos-chem. Code and documentation for ORCHIDEE (MICT v8.4.4) is publicly available at http://forge.ipsl.jussieu.fr/orchidee.

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Acknowledgements

The study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42325102), and by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFE0209100). P.C. and X. Lin acknowledge support from European Space Agency (ESA) project RECCAP2-CS (grant no. 4000144908/24/1-LR). P.C. and Y.X. acknowledge support from the CALIPSO project funded by the generosity of Schmidt Science. We are grateful for the computational resources provided by the High-performance Computing Platform of Peking University supercomputing facility. We thank the scientists from NOAA that acquired and provided CH4 site and aircraft data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Carbon Neutrality, Sino-French Institute for Earth System Science, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Gang Liu, Yu Zhu & Shushi Peng

  2. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Lu Shen

  3. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, LSCE/IPSL, CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Philippe Ciais, Xin Lin, Didier Hauglustaine & Yi Xi

  4. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Xin Lan

  5. US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Global Monitoring Laboratory, Boulder, CO, USA

    Xin Lan

  6. Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Alexander J. Turner

  7. Southwest United Graduate School, Kunming, China

    Shushi Peng

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Contributions

S.P. conceived of and designed the study. G.L. and S.P. performed the analysis and created all of the figures. S.P. and Y.X. performed the ORCHIDEE simulations. L.S., G.L. and Y.Z. performed the GEOS-Chem simulations. D.H. and X. Lin provided the LMDZ-INCA OH field. X. Lan provided the surface CH4 observations. G.L. and S.P. drafted the paper, with substantial contributions from P.C., L.S. and X. Lan. X. Lin, D.H., A.J.T. and Y.X. contributed to writing and commenting on the draft paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shushi Peng.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Attribution of changes in seasonal CH4 amplitude between 1984 and 2020 at Barrow, Mauna Loa and South Pole.

Observed and simulated seasonal CH4 amplitude at Barrow (a), Mauna Loa (c) and South Pole (e). The trends of seasonal CH4 amplitude at Barrow (b), Mauna Loa (d) and South Pole (f), and the contributions of emissions (EMI), sink and atmospheric transport (TRA) to the trends of tropospheric seasonal CH4 amplitude. The error bars represent 95% confidence intervals of the estimated trends and the contributions of different factors.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Attribution of the contribution of emission to seasonal amplitude between 1984 and 2020 for six latitudinal bands.

The contributions of fire, anthropogenic, and wetland emissions, and the interaction between atmospheric transport and emissions (IATE; Supplementary Text 4) to the trends of tropospheric average CH4 SCA in six latitudinal bands.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Relationships between wetland surface air temperature and seasonal CH4 amplitude between 1984 and 2020.

The relationship between surface air temperature of high northern wetlands in April, May and June (AMJ) from ERA5 and the observed average seasonal CH4 amplitude derived from 5 northern high latitude ground-based sites (a), the seasonal CH4 amplitude of zonal mean (60°N-90°N) atmospheric CH4 from NOAA observations (b) and the simulated 60°N-90°N tropospheric CH4 SCA (c).

Extended Data Fig. 4 Spatial distribution of the trend in anthropogenic CH4 emissions between 1984 and 2020.

The spatial distribution of the trend in anthropogenic CH4 emissions (a) and the average trend by latitude (b). The mean centre of anthropogenic CH4 emissions in 1985, 1995, 2005 and 2015 is also shown (c).

Extended Data Fig. 5 Attribution of the contribution of sink to seasonal amplitude between 1984 and 2020 for six latitudinal bands.

The contributions of CH4 concentration ([CH4]), OH concentration ([OH]), and the interaction between atmospheric transport and the sink (IATS; Supplementary Text 4) to the trends of tropospheric average CH4 SCA in six latitudinal bands.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Spatial patterns of the trend in OH concentration.

Spatial pattern of trends in OH concentration between 1984–2020 from INCA (a) and GEOS-Chem (b), 1990–2017 from OsloCTM3 (c) and 1984–2014 from the multi-model mean of ESMs (d).

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Texts 1–4, Tables 1–3, Figs. 1–33 and References.

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Liu, G., Shen, L., Ciais, P. et al. Trends in the seasonal amplitude of atmospheric methane. Nature 641, 660–665 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08900-8

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