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.

Vast CO release from Australian fires in 2019-2020 constrained by satellite.

Southeast Australia experienced intensive and geographically extensive wildfires during the 2019-2020 summer season. The fires released substantial amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, existing emission estimates based on fire inventories are uncertain, and vary by up to a factor of four for this event.

A major asymmetric dust trap in a transition disk.

The statistics of discovered exoplanets suggest that planets form efficiently. However, there are fundamental unsolved problems, such as excessive inward drift of particles in protoplanetary disks during planet formation. Recent theories invoke dust traps to overcome this problem.