Methane's effects on sunlight vary by region

Scientists investigating how human-induced increases in atmospheric methane also increase the amount of solar energy absorbed by that gas in our climate system have discovered that this absorption is 10 times stronger over desert regions such as the Sahara Desert and Arabian Peninsula than elsewhere on Earth, and nearly three times more powerful in the presence of clouds.

A research team from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) came to this conclusion after evaluating observations of Jupiter and Titan (a moon of Saturn), where methane concentrations are more than a thousand times those on Earth, to quantify methane's shortwave radiative effects here on Earth.These findings were published online today in the journal Science Advances in an article entitled "Large Regional Shortwave Forcing by Anthropogenic Methane Informed by Jovian Observations." The paper indicates large regional variability in the ways methane acts as a solar absorber, finding that methane absorption, or "radiative forcing," is largely dependent on bright surface features and clouds.