SRON scientists discover dozens of methane plumes every week using the Dutch space instrument TROPOMI. To locate their sources, they then zoom in with other satellites. However, brief methane releases have typically ended before those satellites arrive at the scene. The team has now developed a new method that is fast enough to catch the largest of such emissions. Publication in Geophysical Research Letters.
Zoom-in
ESA’s Sentinel-5p satellite, part of the European Commission’s Copernicus program with the Dutch TROPOMI instrument on board, is the only satellite that measures the global distribution of methane in the atmosphere every day. Each week, a team of SRON scientists publishes an overview of the largest detected methane plumes and identifies their exact sources by asking satellites with a smaller field-of-view but higher resolution to zoom in. UN Environment Programme’s International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) then informs the responsible party.
Brief releases
The tricky part is that some methane emissions only last for a few hours. For example, pipelines are occasionally emptied for maintenance. The climate impact of such events can be significant, similar to the annual use of thousands of cars. But when the zoom-in satellite arrives at the site, the emission has often already ceased.
simultaneous detection
Using a new method, the SRON team can now obtain a zoom-in almost simultaneously with a TROPOMI detection. Just ahead of TROPOMI, a VIIRS instrument from the American NOAA institute is flying in the same orbit but on a different satellite. That instrument was already being used by TROPOMI for information on clouds. But now SRON scientists have also managed to use the VIIRS data to obtain zoomed-in images of the methane plumes detected by TROPOMI. They publish their results in Geophysical Research Letters, with first author Tobias de Jong (SRON).
climate impact of ten thousand cars
For example, the team identified an emission from a pipeline in Kazakhstan, which vented more than 1.5 kilotons of methane into the atmosphere. That methane has the same climate impact as the annual use of ten thousand cars. The researchers also saw a methane plume from a compressor station in Oklahoma and a plume from a gas pipeline in Bulgaria. All three events were followed up by the UN Environment Programme’s IMEO via its Methane Alert and Response System (MARS).
previously unattainable
‘By combining these satellite systems, we’ve gained access to emissions data that was previously unattainable,’ said Itziar Irakulis Loitxate, Remote Sensing Lead, UN Environment Programme’s International Methane Emissions Observatory. ‘This breakthrough and SRON’s contributions are accelerating the expansion of the Methane Alert and Response System, which delivers actionable insights to governments and companies to enable emission reduction. In just the past seven months, these methods have enabled us to identify and report almost 50 large emission events at oil and gas facilities across regions or timeframes that were previously out of reach.’
Publication
de Jong, T. A., Maasakkers, J. D., Irakulis‐Loitxate, I., Randles, C. A., Tol, P., & Aben, I. (2025). Daily global methane super‐emitter detection and source identification with sub‐daily tracking. Geophysical Research Letters, 52, e2024GL111824.