GHGSat’s global methane monitoring map of the world looks like angry blotches of red paint sprayed on the canvas.
Unfortunately, that is not an artist’s imagination. The red is methane emissions. Methane, which is the second most abundant greenhouse gas (GHG) found in the atmosphere after carbon dioxide (CO2), and is more than 25 times as potent in trapping heat.
Despite all the outcry over global warming, greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise. For the second year in a row, NOAA scientists observed a record annual increase in atmospheric levels of methane. This corroborates with GHGSat’s earlier findings, which said the monthly average emission rate increased threefold from January to December 2021 across all industries, points out GHGSat CEO Stephane Germain.
Canada-based GHGSat’s three satellites, which are equipped with special sensors, provides the only high-resolution satellite data dedicated to finding industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
Detection of methane emission from space is new and was not available till the European Space Agency launched Sentinel 5P in 2017. About the same time, GHGSat launched its first satellite to measure greenhouse gases at high resolution. Today, its three satellites are pinpointing the exact sources of emissions at thousands of sites across the world, and its analytics service combines multiple geospatial datasets to inform operators and regulators.
And what all these satellites are revealing has come as a shock — methane is leaking from gas pipelines, oil wells and processing plants, and landfills all over the world. In many cases, emissions are not accounted for in mandatory GHG inventories.
“Much of what we rely on today for these GHG data comes from a patchwork of high-level but often-outdated, country-provided reports,” says Gavin McCormick, one of the ten founding members of Climate TRACE, a coalition of global organizations set up under the leadership of former US Vice President and climate leader Al Gore, and comprises of non-profits, private companies, and academia.
“Our collective goal is to bring radical transparency to global emissions monitoring by pinpointing exactly where emissions are coming from and fill in the critical gaps in existing greenhouse gas emissions inventories,” he adds. Rather than building emission inventories based on ground-up, self-reported estimates, Climate TRACE is taking a top-down approach — by building a global inventory of GHG emissions based on direct, independent observation, by using satellite imagery, AI, and machine learning.
Similarly, Carbon Mapper, another global public-private partnership launched last year, aims to fill gaps in the emerging global ecosystem of methane and CO2 monitoring systems by delivering data at facility scale that is precise, timely, and accessible to empower science-based decision making and action.
“By pinpointing exactly where emissions are coming from, we can work to mitigate them quickly. This technology development is very recent and of critical importance in our time-bound efforts to curb climate change,” says Dr Dan Cusworth, Carbon Project Scientist at Carbon Mapper.
A broad-based coalition of industry, government, philanthropies, and academic institutions, Carbon Mapper data is expected to provide more complete, precise, and timely measurement of point source methane and CO2 emissions as well as 25-plus other indicators.
Planet is one of the key partners of this initiative. “We are excited to see growing public-private partnerships across the satellite industry, such as Carbon Mapper, to digitally map and monitor greenhouse gas emissions to facilitate timely action to mitigate human impacts to Earth’s climate and ecosystems,” said a spokesperson from Planet, which has had a sustained focus on environment with its 24×7 optical satellites.
Other partners include NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the State of California, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and RMI, and the initiative seeks to demonstrate how collaborative relationships can make strides to share critical information needed to mitigate climate change. The first Carbon Mapper satellite is targeting a 2023 launch. The satellites — numbering around 20 — will be built and operated by Planet.
However, climate change is not just about emissions, but a lot more. It includes melting poles and increasing natural disasters. Let’s look at some of the new satellite technologies that are playing a pivotal role in monitoring the most incremental and infinitesimal changes on Earth round the clock.
The jury has reached a verdict. And it is damning. This report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a litany of broken climate promises. It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world. We are on a fast track to climate disaster. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, on April 4, 2022
The biggest hurdles for a satellite to accurately observe Earth are cloud cover and inability to see at night. This is why SAR sensors come into the picture. SAR on a satellite is not a new concept, but for long it was the exclusive purview of national space agencies due to cost barriers. Fitting a SAR sensor onto a satellite under 100 kg was deemed largely impossible before ICEYE did it in 2018. Since then, there have been many more players, but ICEYE continues to be the leader in this space with the largest constellation of SAR satellites in the world — it has 16 in orbit, each weighing about 100 kg.
Unlike traditional Earth-imaging satellites, SAR satellites bounce a powerful radar beam off the surface of the Earth from space, thereby painting a picture of what’s happening below. The radar beams can see through clouds, smoke, and even darkness.
“Our imagery is an ideal tool to monitor changes on the ground through any type of weather and during night-time. We call it persistent monitoring and the imagery is used for detecting changes on the ground,” says ICEYE CEO and Co-founder Rafal Modrzewski.
From a climate perspective, its most dynamic product is the ICEYE flood monitoring solution, which provides near real-time extent of flood information, including the actual depth of water around buildings within 24-hours of a flood’s peak. These come handy for all industries, from insurance and risk management, flood monitoring, maritime safety and oil spill detection, infrastructure monitoring, mining and energy as well as defense and intelligence.
SAR sensors can also capture many changes which are not very obvious.
For instance, the January 15 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption off South Pacific, which wiped out a small island on Tonga and devastated lives and livelihoods in others. The largest eruption in the history of satellite observation triggered tsunamis as far afield as the Caribbean, throwing up gas and ash through the stratosphere into the lower mesosphere. Satellites images showed us the images of the eruption and the immediate damages.
But it was largely the images that we didn’t see that could have been providing vital clues to scientists in understanding and assessing the impact of the volcano.
Within hours, the disaster analysis team at Synspective, a Japanese startup specializing in Earth Observation data analysis, began looking into the changes in the shape of the island and surroundings. By comparing before-and-after Sentinel-1 SAR images, Synspective found out that the island was changing over a period of time — the first eruption, a much smaller one, occurred on December 20, 2021, when the island was enlarged, and then subsided when its size shrank. The massive eruption on January 14-15 again resulted in changes all over.
“We are working on providing data and solutions across a broad variety of areas, from mitigating risks from human-nature interactions, such as landslides, subsidence, flood zones and to better utilization of resources such as green energy. We are also developing solutions which allow customers to better take stock of their forest inventories,” says Vincent Kessler, General Manager at Synspective.
Synspective is also in the process of launching its own SAR constellation. As of March 2022, the company has successfully put two satellites in orbit and will launch its first commercial prototype, StriX-1, this year. By 2023, it plans to have six satellites, with ultimate plan of 30 by 2026.
Satellite-based Earth Observation plays a key role in monitoring volcanoes, especially those in remote areas that can’t be monitored by standard terrestrial networks. And because they can operate at night, or even when there is cloud cover, SAR satellites are fast emerging as a preferred tool to monitor disruptive activities and natural disasters, including severe droughts, wildfires, or floods and hurricanes.
“Now more than ever there is the need to monitor the physical world. Monitoring is necessary because it underpins the commitments being made by the public and private sector to meet climate-related pledges,” iterates Nicole Robinson, President, Ursa Space Systems, a US-based satellite intelligence company that leverages the SAR data from its partner network and its own data fusion expertise to detect real-time changes and analyze patterns in the physical world to help business and government decision-makers.
Ursa persistently monitors over 1,000 locations globally, extracting insights into readymade datasets in areas such as oil storage; auto manufacturing and port monitoring etc. It then translates this SAR data into standardized formats to analyze the patterns of Earth at a deeper level, and understanding behaviors over time in a multi-faceted way.
“SAR is well-suited for this task because of its inherent capabilities, so it’s a good marriage between having the right sensor for collection and the computing power to handle big data analytics,” she adds. In addition to SAR, Ursa also uses optical and RF data for its analysis.
Radio frequency (RF) monitoring satellites listen for any kind of RF activity on Earth from space. Commercial RF monitoring data wasn’t previously available as open source, geospatial dataset before HawkEye 360 launched its unique satellites in 2018. Today, it operates a constellation of three satellites that fly in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) supporting frequent revisits anywhere each day.
“The RF data layer can quickly guide authorities to uncover bad actors that are negatively impacting the global commons, such as illegal fishing that destroys marine ecosystems or illegal strip mining that spoils the ground and rivers. Machine learning helps analysts to sort through the noise to pinpoint how individual actors and nations may be helping or hurting environmental situations,” says Adam Bennett, Senior Director of Product Marketing, HawkEye 360.
For instance, HawkEye’s RF data analysis has yielded insights into the surge of activity across the Arctic, one of the consequences of sea-ice melts that opens up year-round access. The satellites identified vessels traveling through channels that did not previously exist and detected varying concentrations of VHF communication in unexpected places. “As the Arctic melts, aggressive actors and nation states are seizing opportunities to stake their claims in the region,” Bennett adds.
Spire Global, another company that has made a mark in this field, has a constellation of 140-plus nanosatellites which are multi-sensor, including RF, AIS (Automatic Identification Systems used to track maritime vessels), ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast used for air traffic) and GNSS-RO (GNSS Radio Occultation for monitoring the atmosphere).
“At Spire, we are looking to listen to all kinds of signal opportunities out there. This allows us to track various kinds of activities which could potentially be impacting climate change. Additionally, the satellites also gather data around things like soil moisture, sea ice thickness etc.,” says Jeff Rex, Vice President, Business Development, Earth Intelligence.
And because Spire’s satellites are polar orbiting that cover the globe, it gets a complete global picture of atmospheric data. “We have over 10,000 plus soundings any day. And we provide those to a number of different atmospheric organizations around the world, such as EUMETSAT and NOAA. We also provide historical data to organizations working on climatological studies,” adds Rex.
For instance, the Global Fishing Watch is channeling Spire’s AIS data into advanced data analytics, to create an extensive record of global fishing operations — the tools can automatically spot fishing vessels within the vast volume of data, estimate their fishing history, and flag suspicious behavior.
The idea behind hyperspectral imaging is simple — the technique analyzes a wide spectrum of light instead of just assigning primary RGB colors to each pixel. Accordingly, satellites with hyperspectral sensors acquire imagery in hundreds of spectral bands, allowing for very fine observation of the Earth’s surface and distinguishing between different features.
The technology is fast coming up as a complementary data source to conventional optical imagery and SAR and a crucial tool for climate change mitigation.
A number of commercial players, including Planet, have jumped into the fray. As mentioned earlier, Planet is now working on launching a hyperspectral satellite constellation as part of its work with Carbon Mapper. “The Global Methane Pledge is highlighting the urgent need to accelerate methane mitigation to improve monitoring and reporting efforts, and in particular alert operators to leaks and other super-emitter activity. And now, with advancements in hyperspectral imaging, we believe satellites could help to quantify methane leaks globally,” said the Planet spokesperson.
But then climate monitoring is not only about monitoring a forest or sea ice. As Thomas VanMatre, Vice President of Global Business Development, Satellogic, points out, it plays a paramount role in preventing natural phenomena from turning into disasters and catastrophes. “The disasters are not natural stricto sensu, because they are always linked to human activity,” he adds.
A pioneer in commercial hyperspectral imaging with small satellites, Satellogic’s data provides powerful insights for floods, landslides, wildfires, volcano eruptions, among others, including the effects of such events such as damage assessments of settlements and/or infrastructure, monitoring of population displacements, mapping and verifying safe evacuation routes, and more.
Similarly, Orbital Sidekick’s hyperspectral sensors in space allow it to chemically fingerprint data that it captures for oil & gas industry — helping them not only detect leaks early, but also prevent them. “Our aim is to allow customers to find the problem areas as early as possible and in near real-time. Preventing accidents from happening on an asset and/or detecting issues as early as possible is the best way to mitigate issues surrounding climate change,” says Michael DeJesus, Vice President of Product at Orbital Sidekick.
Another big use case in the climate sphere that Orbital Sidekick works on is fighting forest fires. “With our MVP sensor on the International Space Station, we used the data to understand how we can build a product that would allow a user to look at where the highest risk for a forest fire to start might be,” he says. This includes vegetative management along power lines for utility companies, and then, once a fire starts, where is it likely to spread.
“Hyperspectral imaging has numerous scientific, environmental, humanitarian, defense, and commercial applications. High revisit-rate hyperspectral monitoring missions will feed advanced computing algorithms that allow new insights into patterns of life and a greater ability to quantify, analyze, and classify human and natural activity on the Earth,” VanMatre adds.
When it comes to something as enormous and complex as climate change, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. What is needed is a systems-of-systems approach where different sensors provide different solutions.
“As technology advances, you’re going to get better resolution, spatial for optical as well as radar-based sensors, spectral, and temporal, higher downlink capabilities, systems to do edge computing on board the satellite, and lastly analytics that help turn all this data into all types of insights including climate monitoring,” says DeJesus.
Agrees Cusworth of Carbon Mapper when he says accurately measuring and monitoring global emission sources requires a global system of systems to provide a complete and actionable dataset that can highlight where emissions are coming from at various levels of specificity (geographically, by sector, and by facility) and based on these insights prescribe the best mitigation pathways.
“New satellites, sensors, airborne observations, and ground observations are all part of this important and growing ecosystem to effectively pinpoint, track, and ultimately mitigate CO2 and methane emissions, informing science-based, near-term action by countries and companies alike,” he says.
Similarly, India-based Blue Sky Analytics has created a geospatial data refinery, where, instead of treating each dataset like an individual product and building out the tech infrastructure for each one, a single automated infrastructure is replicable and scalable.
“Therefore, for each new dataset, we can reuse the same pipeline and focus our efforts on the data sources, scientific expertise, and algorithm development thereby reducing our production time,” says Kshitij Purwar, Founder and CTO of Blue Sky, which is also a founder member of the Climate TRACE coalition.
Blue Sky’s first dataset, BreeZo (for air quality monitoring) took nine months to develop, while the second, Zuri (for monitoring GHG emissions from biomass fires), took only four months. The goal is to reduce this to 45 days for each new dataset.
“Our proprietary geospatial data intelligence platform is built via a new and innovative application of multiple existing technologies, and compared to the current solutions, our data refinery can process crude data to insightful information in a shorter time frame at 1/100th of the cost with a thousand times higher resolution,” Purwar adds.
Mark Hogsett, Director of Business Development, BlackSky, points out that real-time actionable satellite data, analytics, and insights can be delivered at the pace and scale of mission operations through intuitive web-based interfaces that require no IT infrastructure or setup.
BlackSky’s analytic platform, Spectra AI, can automatically tip and cue its satellites in response to environmental changes caused by both human and natural events. And then, capture and delivery of images can be done within hours to help in climate-related decision-making.
The past two decades have also witnessed major improvements in processing capabilities with strides in cloud services, computation methods and API availability. Services like Google Earth Engine can now provide terrabytes of data instantly.
“Additionally, with the advancements in machine learning and deep learning, more sophisticated algorithms could extract deeper and better decision- useful insights that were earlier impossible,” points out Purwar, which leverages satellite data, Artificial Intelligence, and cloud computing to provide near real-time, high-resolution data via easy-to-plug in APIs. This solves a key challenge for analysts who are on the lookout for high-quality environmental data as input for modelling, diligence, and credit scoring.
Similarly, whether it’s a human-made event or a natural disaster that can cause observable change to land cover, coastlines or buildings, real-time analytics can help with assessments, relief efforts, or help quantify a damage assessment for insurance purposes.
For example, BlackSky’s technology will be used this summer to help monitor water reservoirs in remote, hard-to-reach areas to check algae blooms that might impact the quality of potable water supply. Further, the platform can monitor for changes in a municipality’s tree canopy, which can be instrumental in mitigating heat. Its automatic detect capabilities enable it to send an alert to authorities notifying them of any reduction of trees. Officials could compare that information against permits for tree removal and, if the removal was unsanctioned, follow up with the correct activity.
Echoes Germain of GHGSat when he says while new capabilities for monitoring emissions are on the horizon, the most exciting innovation lies with analysts developing algorithms that get the best results using high-resolution satellite data.
We are now at a point where we can automate and process information without humans in the loop, at a scale and pace that is unmatched and meaningful for decision-making. “So, the size of the data is no longer the limit; it’s now a function of the creativity behind the algorithms to generate new knowledge from the data that we have,” Hogsett says.
As crucial as climate change mitigation is to the world and the incredible role satellites can play, it does leave one wondering why hasn’t this received a broader platform of interest?
“One reason could be that we as an industry and global community haven’t done a good job in translating the impact of climate change in a ‘so what’ language that could be interpreted by the satellite industry, professionals as well as their users to connect the impact of the technology as a solution to some of the greatest climate change challenges,” says Robinson of Ursa.
She gives the example of the melting polar caps. “Why should satellite play a role here? What does it mean? What can be enabled by better understanding this melt and the impact? Two use cases perhaps we could explore to highlight that ‘so what’ factor,” she explains.
First, from a commercial shipping point of view, melting ice caps allows for increased shipping routes and potentially reduced time to make deliveries, oil consumption, and positive impact on global supply chain challenges. But then, melting ice caps create a correlating opportunity for piracy, and unwanted naval movements that require surveillance and response.
Until recently, we have been able to use satellite data to see how the planet looks like in various spectral bands and resolutions. Now it’s becoming possible to know how our planet breathes. Over the next years, we will be able to understand ecological processes at an unprecedented level — detect methane emissions to improve and fix extraction leaks, measure soil organic carbon to understand where real change is happening, measure air quality and how different contaminants are spread.
As VanMatre says, “It is imperative that we amplify the message that climate change affects health, agriculture, energy, resources, political and social landscapes. This is the time when local measurements and local models can’t help us: our most pressing problems are global and interconnected. We need global solutions to tackle them.”
