Abstract

In the face of escalating climate change, reducing atmospheric methane concentrations has emerged as a near-term mitigation strategy. Atmospheric observations of methane from airborne and satellite remote sensing platforms may be a pivotal resource for mitigation as it offers scalability, precision, and improved understanding of the sources and sinks of methane. In the oil & gas sector, numerous field campaigns over the last decade, including numerous Carbon Mapper airborne surveys, have shown that many basins in the U.S. and globally exhibit strong "super-emitter" behavior, meaning that a small fraction of infrastructure is responsible for disproportionate emissions. Super-emitters in some cases are very long lasting - we show from recent 2024 Carbon Mapper campaigns in the Permian Basin that at least 20% of super-emitter emissions derive from individual sources that whose large emission behavior lasts days to weeks on end. In the landfill sector, landfill models that underpin inventories struggle to capture the complexity of gas generation and collection efficiency, leading to significant discrepancies with airborne and satellite observations. These discrepancies often are due to generally unquantified sources like the landfill working face. Ultimately, using remote sensing platforms to quantify, characterize, and validate emission reductions requires a systematic global observing solution. With the launch of Carbon Mapper Coalition's Tanager-1 satellite, Carbon Mapper will contribute to the growing remote sensing observing system for greenhouse gas observation and mitigation.

Bio

Daniel Cusworth is the Science Director for Carbon Mapper. Carbon Mapper’s mission is to drive greenhouse gas emission reductions by making methane and carbon dioxide data accessible and actionable. Daniel oversees algorithm development, validation, analysis, and applications of airborne and satellite greenhouse gas datasets. He was formerly a Data Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Research Scientist at University of Arizona and worked on quantification of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions from regional to facility scales. He received his B.S. in Applied Math/Atmospheric Sciences at UCLA and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry at Harvard University.

References

Cusworth, D.H., Duren, R.M., Ayasse, A.K., Jiorle, R., Howell, K., Aubrey, A., Green, R.O., Eastwood, M.L., Chapman, J.W., Thorpe, A.K. and Heckler, J., 2024. Quantifying methane emissions from United States landfills. Science, 383(6690), pp.1499-1504.

 Cusworth, D.H., Thorpe, A.K., Ayasse, A.K., Stepp, D., Heckler, J., Asner, G.P., Miller, C.E., Yadav, V., Chapman, J.W., Eastwood, M.L. and Green, R.O., 2022. Strong methane point sources contribute a disproportionate fraction of total emissions across multiple basins in the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(38), p.e2202338119.