Dr. Ben Poulter (Deputy Director of the White House Greenhouse Gas Measurement, Monitoring, Reporting and Verification Office)

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is a critical component in recent domestic and international climate policies, yet the recent acceleration in atmospheric methane concentrations is raising concerns over how climate change is now driving uncontrollable wetland methane feedbacks. Comprehensive measurement and monitoring of methane sources and sinks is needed to understand Earth system feedbacks and to support the range of policies that have emerged to tackle point source emissions and track basin-scale progress in methane mitigation. This presentation will cover the latest Global Methane Budget (published in September 2024), coordinated by the Global Carbon Project and involving contributions from scientists around the globe that helps understand areas of confidence and uncertainties in methane emissions and removals. The presentation will then cover areas of research advancing wetland methane emissions measurements, monitoring and modeling through the activities that include Fluxnet-CH4, the NASA BlueFlux airborne field campaign, and satellite remote sensing to support atmospheric inversions. Collectively, this research is helping reduce the latency and providing seasonal-to-subseasonal forecasts of wetland methane emissions that provide new contexts for how well we understand wetlands as well as provide new opportunities for open-science via the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center.

Dr. Ben Poulter is the Deputy Director of the White House Greenhouse Gas Measurement, Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (GHG MMRV) Office at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Ben is on detail at OSTP from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where he leads a team in the Biospheric Sciences Lab. in the Earth Sciences Division. Ben received his PhD from Duke University in 2005 studying the impacts of sea-level rise on coastal ecosystems and wetland biogeochemistry. Following his PhD, Ben worked in Europe developing land-surface models to understand human and climate impacts on the global carbon and methane budgets. His team uses chamber, tower, aircraft and satellite data to develop numerical and machine learning models to understand wetland methane emissions at regional to global scales. He co-led the science and applications team for the NASA Surface Biology and Geology mission and was on the team for the recently competed CarbonFOX GHG satellite concept. He co-leads the Global Carbon Project’s Global Methane Budget and the REgional Carbon Cycle and Processes study (RECCAP2) and was contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth and Sixth Reports.