Assessment of the theoretical limit in instrumental detectability of Arctic methane sources using 13 C atmospheric signal

Abstract. Despite their modest 4 % magnitude compared to global emissions, Arctic methane sources are key elements in closing the global atmospheric methane budget, due to high uncertainties in their quantification and to their strong climate sensitivity. Recent efforts brought together bottom-up quantification approaches (inventories, process-based models) and regional observations of methane concentrations through inverse modelling to better estimate the Arctic methane sources, but the relatively small number of available observations in Arctic regions leaves gaps in fully understanding the drivers and distributions of the different types of methane sources present in the Arctic. Observations of methane isotope ratios could bring new insights on methane processes with increasingly affordable and accurate instruments. Here, we present the source signal that could be observed from methane isotopic measurements if high-resolution observations were available, and thus what requirements should be fulfilled in future instrument deployments in terms of accuracy in order to constrain different emission categories. This theoretical study uses the regional chemistry-transport model CHIMERE driven by different scenarios of isotopic signatures for each regional methane source mix. It is found that if the current network of methane monitoring sites is equipped with instruments measuring the isotopic signal continuously, only sites that are significantly influenced by emission sources could differentiate regional emissions from the background with a reasonable level of confidence. Nevertheless, we show that the detection of individual Arctic sources requires daily accuracies of 0.5 ‰, 0.2 ‰, 0.15 ‰, and 0.1 ‰ for wetlands, freshwaters, ESAS, and anthropogenic Arctic emissions, respectively, although these limits vary considerably depending on the observational site.