Published in

American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science Advances, 46(9), 2023

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh2391

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

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

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 CH 4 hour −1 ) and carbon dioxide sources (1571 to 3511 tonnes CO 2 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 CH 4 hour −1 ). These results highlight the contributions of current and planned point source imagers in closing global carbon budgets.