Google Research and NASA JPL have released a deep learning model that maps methane plumes globally at 60 metres, finding about 50% more than human analysts and 23,000 additional plumes, including at 24 of the 25 largest-emitting landfills. Europe’s Methane Regulation ordered a satellite monitoring tool and a super-emitter alert system, but it covers only oil, gas and coal.
Google Research and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have released a deep learning model that maps methane plumes worldwide from space, Google Research said. It flags around 50% more plumes than human analysts, and 23,000 more than the existing product.
The model is a vision transformer trained on 3.6 million simulated plumes. It reads raw spectra from EMIT, a NASA instrument on the International Space Station, at 60 metres per pixel.
Europe already runs a version of this. The Copernicus atmosphere service switched on a methane hotspot explorer in February last year, built by Dutch researchers on Sentinel-5P data.
The two are not doing the same job. Sentinel-5P covers the planet daily at roughly 5.5 by 3.5 kilometres per pixel, a region rather than a site.
