For years, countries have told the United Nations how much methane they emit using a kind of bottom-up bookkeeping: Count the cows and oil barrels, estimate the volume of trash, and multiply by standard emission factors.

Those ledgers can miss the mark, suggest measurements from aircraft and satellites. But the tools to translate that data into national emissions estimates have largely remained the domain of specialists.

A team at Harvard is changing that. In a recent Nature Communications paper, the researchers describe Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI), an open-access system designed to let governments, researchers and civil society independently evaluate national methane claims against what satellites detect in the atmosphere, year after year.