Development Plan for Best Practices for Remote Sensing of Methane Plumes from Space

There has been explosive growth in the field of remote sensing of methane plume from aircraft and satellite. The global reach and inherent spatial sampling capabilities of on-orbit instruments make them uniquely suited for consistent, repeatable surveys across regions and borders. These measurements have primarily been applied to the fossil energy and waste sectors (Cusworth et al., 2022; Thorpe et al., 2023), with current satellites typically detecting emissions exceeding ≈100 kg CH₄ per hour, while airborne platforms can observe sources as small as ≈10 kg CH₄ per hour.

Despite the rapid growth in observational capacity, challenges remain. Divergent emissions estimates, opaque methodologies, and inconsistent validation approaches can erode confidence in remote sensing-based emissions data. The emergence of non-public-sector missions using proprietary methods—often without full transparency across the data chain—further highlights the need for community-accepted practices to ensure traceability, comparability, and scientific credibility.

To address this need, the greenhouse gas (GHG) community—through the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) and National Metrology Institutes (NMIs)— developed a document in 2025 to articulate commonly accepted approaches for quantifying methane emissions based on observed plumes (Worden et al., 2025). It provides guidance spanning from Level 0/1 radiance, to Level 2 concentration, to Level 4 emissions, and includes current practices for validation and quality assessment. The focus is on emissions derived from discrete plumes, rather than from spatially diffuse sources.

 In this poster, we will discuss some key points of the current practices report as well as plans for next steps to perform intercomparisons and work towards a Best Practices document. This work has shifted from NIST to the Climate Data Collaborative of the Data Foundation in the US, and will be performed in collaboration with researchers and agencies across the US and Europe in 2026 including CEOS, CGMS, NPL, LLBL, UKSA, ESA, and the MEDUSA project.

References:

Cusworth, D. H., Thorpe, A. K., Ayasse, A. K., Stepp, D., Heckler, J., Asner, G. P., et al. (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), e2202338119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2202338119

Thorpe, A. K., Frankenberg, C., Thompson, D. R., Duren, R. M., Aubrey, A. D., Bue, B. D., ... & Dennison, P. E. (2017). Airborne DOAS retrievals of methane, carbon dioxide, and water vapor concentrations at high spatial resolution: application to AVIRIS-NG. Atmospheric Measurement Techniques, 10(10), 3833-3850.

Worden, J.R., Green, P., Eldering, A., Sherwin, E., 2025, Common Practices for Quantifying Methane Emissions from Plumes Detected by Remote Sensing, https://zenodo.org/records/17047789