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.
Luis Guanter obtained his Ph.D. in Environmental Physics in 2007 from the Universitat de València (Spain). After several postdoctoral positions in Germany and UK, he became Head of the Remote Sensing Section of the GFZ Potsdam in Germany and the Principal Investigator of the satellite imaging spectroscopy mission in 2014. Since March 2019 he is a Full Professor in Applied Physics at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in Spain, where he is leading the LARS (Land and Atmosphere Remote Sensing) group in January 2020. His research is focused on the use of satellite-based spectrometers for the monitoring of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. Luis Guanter has been included in Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers List of the world’s most influential scientists since 2019.
