Planetai Space News
Human activities impact the earth. Some activities generate benefits and others harm our ecosystems. Governments, non-governmental organizations and individuals need to be informed. The industry is starting to take action. Planetai Space team discovers, monitors and reports.
“Methane is a powerful heat-trapping gas. An estimated 60% of today’s methane emissions are the result of human activities”
Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio.
This NASA visualization shows the complex patterns of methane emissions around the globe and throughout the seasons. It shows methane emissions in 2018, based on data from satellites, inventories of human activities, and NASA global computer models.
Space agencies around the world are making efforts aligned with the global strategy to reduce methane emissions. NASA missions that observe methane are:
Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT)
Airborne Visible InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer - Next Generation (AVIRIS-NG)
Arctic Boreal and Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE)
GeoCarb (Launch date: 2024)
“In the quest to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, detecting methane leaks has become increasingly vital.”
Credit: ESA monitoring methane from space.
Satellites have a really important role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Tropomi instrument onboard the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite is the only instrument that maps global methane concentrations every single day. This lets scientists detect hotspots for large methane sources around the world – allowing us to address the consequences of methane emissions on our climate and environment. ESA missions that observe methane are:
TROPOMI on Copernicus Sentinel-5p
IASI on MetOp-B
GHGSat Mission
“To truly enforce international emission standards, we need international standards for observation methods, data measurements, and calculations.”
Credit: Jaxa measuring Green House Gases from space.
The Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle (GOSAT-GW※1) is an Earth observation satellite that is responsible for the greenhouse gases observation missions and the water cycle variation observation missions.
The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 3 (AMSR3) on GOSAT-GW is the successor of the AMSR2 on GCOM-W (SHIZUKU) and aims to realize the world's top-performing microwave radiometer.
Microwave radiometer can observe physical quantities related to water over the land and sea surfaces, and insides the clouds by its cloud penetrating capability.