Methane & Air Quality Monitoring

One instrument family serves two quite different audiences. For environmental and city authorities it is air quality: where the pollution is, how it moves with the season, which corridors and industrial areas stand out. For the energy sector it is methane, and there the status of the question has changed. The EU methane regulation makes measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification mandatory for oil, gas and coal operators and for importers, and provides for a monitoring tool built on satellite data together with a rapid reaction mechanism that notifies states of super-emitting events.

It is worth being exact about what satellites do here. They map trace gases daily and globally at coarse spatial resolution: excellent for regional patterns, plumes and large point sources, useless for a single leaking valve. Super-emitter events are exactly the class they are good at: large, often short-lived, and otherwise invisible until somebody chooses to report them.

The service provides a regional time series with anomaly detection against a seasonal baseline, so that an unusual week reads as unusual rather than as weather; plume delineation with back-tracing through the wind field toward a likely origin; attribution to nearby assets where any exist; and a retained evidence record for each event (imagery, date, plume extent, wind conditions). For the air-quality audience the same machinery produces pollutant maps, seasonal patterns and hotspot rankings over a city or a region.