An inventory is what methane emissions are expected to be: activity data multiplied by emission factors, counted up and spread across a grid. Nobody measured the air to make one. Five of them cover Utah, and the first thing to know is that they disagree — about the total, and about which sector it comes from.
Each inventory's most recent year, broken into the categories all of them can be compared on. GFEI counts fossil fuels only, so its bar is deliberately short. WetCHARTs counts natural wetlands and is shown apart, because adding it to an anthropogenic accounting would be double counting the wrong way.
Emissions per grid cell, for the most recent year each inventory carries. The colour scale is logarithmic: a landfill cell and an empty desert cell differ by more than a thousandfold, and a linear scale shows only the former.
The same totals in each inventory's own sector names, which is where the disagreement becomes concrete. Sector definitions are not shared between inventories, so read down a column, not across.
Only EDGAR carries a long record. Whatever one makes of the absolute value, the direction it reports over half a century is worth seeing.
The one natural source here is also the only strongly seasonal one. The band is the interquartile range across 2001–2019, so it shows how much a given month varies from year to year.
| Inventory | Covers | Years | Grid | What to know |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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