Methane Emissions Monitoring Using Geostationary Satellites

Satellite imaging has proven to be crucial to monitor methane emissions and help reduce them. In this paper, we propose an automatic practical methodology to use time series from geostationary satellites like GOES-16. While these satellites offer a poor spatial and spectral resolution, their revisit time is unmatched: GOES-16 delivers an image every five minutes for the CONUS region. The proposed approach takes advantage of this fast revisit time to monitor the evolution of large methane emissions. We show the performance on an emission in Mexico and another in the US. This is the first step toward a real time monitoring of methane emissions using geostationary satellite imagery.