News.

4 July 2026

Phase 2 kick-off.

SMART-CH4 Phase 2 formally started on 9 April 2026 (T0) and runs for 12 months. Its kick-off meeting was held on 4 July 2026. Phase 2 attacks the two bottlenecks Phase 1 identified: point-source methane detections cannot yet be merged into regional or national budgets, and global inversions carry a systematic stratospheric bias that distorts the surface emissions they infer.

Phase 2 is organised in two work packages: WP1 (led by CEA-LSCE) builds a Bayesian framework to combine fine-scale plume detections with area-scale mapping across Europe; WP2 (led by VUA) runs new AirCore balloon campaigns and five dedicated experiments to assess and mitigate the stratospheric bias. Two new partners join the consortium: Carbon Mapper and LMD. Read the full Phase 2 page →

2 April 2026

Phase 1 Final Review, Ispra.

SMART-CH4 closed Phase 1 with its Final Review in Ispra on 2 April 2026. The review covered three years of work: four improvements now in the operational Sentinel-5P methane product, 217 persistent methane source regions mapped worldwide, a landfill near Bucharest found to emit roughly 40 times its official reported figure, and a systematic stratospheric bias identified across eleven global inversion systems.

The findings presented at the Final Review are now on the Results pages, organised by theme. The two open problems the review identified — integrating point-source detections into regional budgets, and the stratospheric bias — became the scope of Phase 2.

2025

TROPOMI/WFMD v2.0 released.

IUP Bremen released version 2.0 of the TROPOMI/WFMD scientific methane product, replacing the previous Random Forest quality filter with XGBoost and improving the training data. Validated against 26 TCCON sites over May 2018 – June 2024, it delivers a systematic error of 4.4 ppb, a global offset of just 0.7 ppb, and roughly 10% more usable data on average — over 40% more in the Arctic.

The algorithm paper (Schneising et al.) is published in AMT (doi:10.5194/amt-19-2407-2026). Full details on the Retrievals results page; data via Data.