National quantifications of methane emissions from fuel exploitation using high resolution inversions of satellite observations.

Reducing methane emissions from fossil fuel exploitation (oil, gas, coal) is an important target for climate policy, but current national emission inventories submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are highly uncertain. Here we use 22 months (May 2018-Feb 2020) of satellite observations from the TROPOMI instrument to better quantify national emissions worldwide by inverse analysis at up to 50 km resolution. We find global emissions of 62.

Using satellites to uncover large methane emissions from landfills.

As atmospheric methane concentrations increase at record pace, it is critical to identify individual emission sources with high potential for mitigation. Here, we leverage the synergy between satellite instruments with different spatiotemporal coverage and resolution to detect and quantify emissions from individual landfills. We use the global surveying Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) to identify large emission hot spots and then zoom in with high-resolution target-mode observations from the GHGSat instrument suite to identify the responsible facilities and characterize their emissions.

Methane Emissions from Superemitting Coal Mines in Australia Quantified Using TROPOMI Satellite Observations.

Two years of satellite observations were used to quantify methane emissions from coal mines in Queensland, the largest coal-producing state in Australia. The six analyzed surface and underground coal mines are estimated to emit 570 ± 98 Gg a in 2018-2019. Together, they account for 7% of the national coal production while emitting 55 ± 10% of the reported methane emission from coal mining in Australia.

The added value of satellite observations of methane forunderstanding the contemporary methane budget.

Surface observations have recorded large and incompletely understood changes to atmospheric methane (CH) this century. However, their ability to reveal the responsible surface sources and sinks is limited by their geographical distribution, which is biased towards the northern midlatitudes. Data from Earth-orbiting satellites designed specifically to measure atmospheric CH have been available since 2009 with the launch of the Japanese Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT).

Quantifying methane emissions from the largest oil-producing basin in the United States from space.

Using new satellite observations and atmospheric inverse modeling, we report methane emissions from the Permian Basin, which is among the world's most prolific oil-producing regions and accounts for >30% of total U.S. oil production.