Attribution of individual methane and carbon dioxide emission sources using EMIT observations from space

Creators: Thorpe, Andrew K.¹; Green, Robert O.¹; Thompson, David R.¹; Brodrick, Philip G.¹; Chapman, John W.¹; Elder, Clayton D.¹; Irakulis-Loitxate, Itziar^{2, 3}; Cusworth, Daniel H.^{4, 5}; Ayasse, Alana K.^{4, 5}; Duren, Riley M.^{1, 6, 5}; Frankenberg, Christian⁷; Guanter, Luis^{2, 8}; Worden, John R.¹; Dennison, Philip E.⁹; Roberts, Dar A.¹⁰; Chadwick, K. Dana¹; Eastwood, Michael L.¹; Fahlen, Jay E.¹; Miller, Charles E.¹

1. Jet Propulsion Lab
2. Universitat Politècnica de València
3. International Methane Emissions Observatory, United Nations Environment Programme, Paris, France.
4. Carbon Mapper, Pasadena, CA, USA.
5. University of Arizona
6. Carbon Mapper, Pasadena, CA, USA
7. California Institute of Technology
8. Environmental Defense Fund, Amsterdam, 1017, Netherlands.
9. University of Utah
10. University of California, Santa Barbara

Abstract

Carbon dioxide and methane emissions are the two primary anthropogenic climate-forcing agents and an important source of uncertainty in the global carbon budget. Uncertainties are further magnified when emissions occur at fine spatial scales (<1 km), making attribution challenging. We present the first observations from NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) imaging spectrometer showing quantification and attribution of fine-scale methane (0.3 to 73 tonnes CH₄ hour⁻¹) and carbon dioxide sources (1571 to 3511 tonnes CO₂ hour⁻¹) spanning the oil and gas, waste, and energy sectors. For selected countries observed during the first 30 days of EMIT operations, methane emissions varied at a regional scale, with the largest total emissions observed for Turkmenistan (731 ± 148 tonnes CH₄ hour⁻¹). These results highlight the contributions of current and planned point source imagers in closing global carbon budgets.

Copyright and License

© 2023 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the contributions of the entire EMIT engineering and science teams and the ISS team for enabling the EMIT mission. We thank NASA’s Earth Science Division with special thanks to J. Kaye for continued support of the greenhouse gas application. The EMIT greenhouse gas application online mapping tool was developed by the JPL MMGIS team. Additional support was provided by Carbon Mapper, the University of Arizona, NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and others. This work was undertaken in part at the JPL, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA (80NM0018D0004).

Funding

This study was supported by funding provided by both the JPL and NASA’s Earth Science Division.

Contributions

Conceptualization: A.K.T., R.O.G., D.R.T., R.M.D., C.F., L.G., P.E.D., D.A.R., M.L.E., and C.E.M. Methodology: A.K.T., R.M.D., D.H.C., D.R.T., P.G.B., and A.K.A. Investigation: A.K.T., I.I.-L., J.W.C., and C.D.E. Visualization: A.K.T. and P.G.B. Supervision: A.K.T. and K.D.C. Writing (original draft): A.K.T., P.G.B., C.D.E., D.R.T., and P.G.B. Writing (review and editing): A.K.T., C.D.E., D.R.T., P.G.B., J.R.W., R.M.D., P.E.D., D.A.R., L.G., I.I.-L., C.E.M., and J.E.F.

Data Availability

All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. All EMIT radiance data are available through the LP DAAC at the following link: https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/emitl1bradv001. All codes are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8156665 (81), https://github.com/emit-sds, and https://github.com/emit-sds/emit-ghg. The plume examples presented in this study are available through the EMIT applications online mapping tool (https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/data/data-portal/Greenhouse-Gases/) with periodic updates reflecting additional observed emissions.

Supplemental Material

Text S1 and S2; Fig. S1; Table S1 (PDF).

Files

Name	Size	Download all
sciadv.adh2391.pdf md5:ef51cc5367a2b0ca4469bc2568e5ac67	3.0 MB	Preview Download
sciadv.adh2391_sm.pdf md5:0ae0fb84f6c115e4160d32df061b95c6	317.2 kB	Preview Download

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes