Webinar with Luis Guanter
recorded September 24, 2026
High Resolution Mapping of Trace Gas Super-Emitters with Non-Atmospheric Spaceborne Instruments
Webinar with Luis Guanter (Departamento de Física Aplicada, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain)
Rapid advances are transforming the way in which we watch the atmosphere from space. Many Earth-observing satellite missions built to study land, water, and minerals turn out to be serendipitous sensors of anthropogenic gas emissions, capable of spotting individual sources of harmful gases that were previously invisible. For methane, a potent greenhouse gas, these methods have matured rapidly and now routinely pinpoint major leaks worldwide. Building on this success, the same instruments are being shown to also detect plumes of carbon dioxide, ammonia, nitrogen dioxide, ethylene, and carbon monoxide. This rapidly expanding capability opens an unprecedented window onto the world’s largest pollution sources. Upcoming missions, especially global-coverage imaging spectrometers such as ESA/Copernicus’ CHIME, promise to turn these detections into routine, operational monitoring.
