Toward a versatile spaceborne architecture for immediate monitoring of the global methane pledge

Abstract

The global methane pledge paves a fresh, critical way toward carbon neutrality. However, it remains largely invisible and highly controversial due to the fact that planet-scale and plant-level methane retrievals have rarely been coordinated. This has never been more essential within the narrow window to reach the Paris target. Here we present a two-tiered spaceborne architecture to address this issue. Using this framework, we focused on the United States, China, the Middle East, and North Africa, and simultaneously uncovered methane-abundant regions and plumes. These include new super-emitters, potential leakages, and unprecedented multiple plumes in a single source. More importantly, this framework is shown to challenge official emission reports that possibly mislead estimates from global, regional, and site scales, particularly by missing super-emitters. Our results show that, in principle, the above framework can be extended to be multi-tiered by adding upcoming stereoscopic measurements and suitable artificial intelligence, and thus it is sufficiently versatile for immediate and future monitoring of the global methane pledge.