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The authors are grateful to Jason McKeever and the GHGSat team for the acquisition and processing of the GHGSat data used in this study. We are thankful to Dan Cusworth (Carbon Mapper) for the AVIRIS-NG data used in this study. Carbon Mapper fully funded, selected flight areas during the campaign, and processed (retrieval, detection, quantification) the CH4 data for those AVIRIS-NG flights. We are grateful to Daniel Varon for providing the WRF-LES data used in this study. We thank the Italian Space Agency and the DLR Space Agency for the PRISMA and EnMAP acquisitions, respectively, and the NASA JPL team for the EMIT data used in this work.

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Detecting methane emissions from palm oil mills with airborne and spaceborne imaging spectrometers

Publicat a:Environmental Research Letters. 19 (12): 124003- - 2024-12-01 19(12), DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ad8806

Autors: Valverde, Adriana; Roger, Javier; Gorrono, Javier; Irakulis-Loitxate, Itziar; Guanter, Luis

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title Methane (CH4) emissions from human activities are a major cause of global warming, necessitating effective mitigation strategies. In particular, the palm oil industry generates palm oil mill (POM) effluent, which continuously emits methane into the atmosphere. Satellites are becoming a powerful tool to detect and quantify methane emissions, but there is no evidence of their ability to monitor those from POM ponds. In this work, we have tested the potential of methane-capable satellite instruments to detect and quantify emissions from these ponds. We have focused on the satellite missions with the highest sensitivity to methane emissions, namely the GHGSat commercial constellation and the PRISMA, EnMAP, and EMIT imaging spectroscopy missions. We have also tested the AVIRIS-NG airborne imaging spectrometer. We report three methane plumes from POMs in Indonesia with GHGSat and two in Colombia with AVIRIS-NG. In the cases of EnMAP, PRISMA and EMIT, we observed substantial methane concentration enhancements over several ponds in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Colombia. It remains unclear whether they are due to retrieval artifacts caused by the particular albedo of the ponds, although the low spatial correlation between those enhancements and the ponds suggests that at least a fraction of the enhancements is caused by real emissions. By leveraging advanced imaging techniques and satellite data, this research contributes to progressing strategies to address new methane emissions sources with high mitigation potential, providing a first step toward the satellite-based monitoring of methane emissions from POMs.

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