Towards Methane Detection Onboard Satellites
This work addresses methane monitoring for climate change mitigation by enabling faster, cost-effective detection onboard satellites, though it is incremental in improving existing methods.
The paper tackles methane detection from satellites by introducing a method that uses unorthorectified data, achieving performance comparable to orthorectified data and outperforming a baseline matched filter.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and a major driver of climate change, making its timely detection critical for effective mitigation. Machine learning (ML) deployed onboard satellites can enable rapid detection while reducing downlink costs, supporting faster response systems. Conventional methane detection methods often rely on image processing techniques, such as orthorectification to correct geometric distortions and matched filters to enhance plume signals. We introduce a novel approach that bypasses these preprocessing steps by using \textit{unorthorectified} data (UnorthoDOS). We find that ML models trained on this dataset achieve performance comparable to those trained on orthorectified data. Moreover, we also train models on an orthorectified dataset, showing that they can outperform the matched filter baseline (mag1c). We release model checkpoints and two ML-ready datasets comprising orthorectified and unorthorectified hyperspectral images from the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) sensor at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SpaceML/UnorthoDOS , along with code at https://github.com/spaceml-org/plume-hunter.