Methane is a colorless, odorless, flammable and explosive gas, which not only is the cause to induce significant security risk in coal mining operation, but also one of the important greenhouse gases, so the monitoring of methane is extremely critical. A trace methane gas sensor is designed and developed using the combination of tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) and wavelength modulation spectroscopy (WMS) detection technology, which is based on the methane R(3) absorption branch in 2v3 second harmonic band. Through tuning parameters -0.591 cm-1·K-1, using the method that change the working temperature of distributed feedback (DFB) laser to obtain the best absorption wavelength of methane at 1.654 μm. When the mid-wavelength of DFB laser is selected, the appropriate emitting intension can be obtained via adjusting the amplitude of inject current of DFB laser. Meanwhile, combining the frequency modulation technology to move the bandwidth of detection signal from low frequency to high frequency to reduce the 1/f noise. With aspect to the optical structure, utilizing herriott cell with 76 m effective optical path to guarantee the detection of trace methane is successful. Utilizing the proposed trace methane sensor to extract the second harmonic signal of detected methane in the range of 50 to 5 000 μmol·mol-1, and adopting minimum mean square error criterion to fit the relationship between methane concentration and signal noise ratio, harmonic peak signal and methane concentration, respectively. In addition, the minimum detection limit is 1.4 μmol·mol-1. The experiment results show the symmetry of harmonic waveform is good, no intensity modulation, and the factor of intensity-modulated impacts on harmonic detection is eliminated.