Methane emissions, be it from industrial cattle farming or fossil fuel extraction, are responsible for roughly 30 percent of the Earth’s climate change issues. But despite the massive amounts of methane emissions released into the atmosphere every year, it’s often difficult to track the pollutant—apart from being invisible to the human eye and satellites’ multispectral near-infrared wavelength sensors, methane is also hard to assess due to spectral noise in the atmosphere.
To help tackle this immediate crisis, Google and the Environmental Defense Fund are teaming up for a new project with lofty goals. Announced in a new blog post earlier today, MethaneSAT in a new, AI-enhanced satellite project to better track and quantify the dangerous emissions, with an aim to offer the info to researchers around the world.
“MethaneSAT is highly sophisticated; it has a unique ability to monitor both high-emitting methane sources and small sources spread over a wide area,” Yael Maguire, Google’s VP and General Manager of Geo Developer & Sustainability, said in a February 14 statement.
[Related: How AI could help scientists spot ‘ultra-emission’ methane plumes faster—from space.]
To handle such a massive endeavor, the EDF developed new algorithmic software with researchers at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory andHarvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and its Center for Astrophysics. Their new supercomputer-powered AI system can calculate methane emissions in specific locations, and subsequently track those pollutants as they spread in the atmosphere.
MethaneSAT is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in…
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