PlumeQuant: Uncertainty-aware consistency assessment of methane plume masks and emission-rate estimates
This work provides a consistency-check tool for methane plume products, flagging ambiguous plumes for expert review, but is an incremental diagnostic rather than a new detection method.
The authors show that published methane plume masks from imaging spectrometers are not uniquely constrained by their scalar quantities (IME, plume length, emission rate), with a median of only 13% of the plausible footprint envelope being consistently identified. They introduce PlumeQuant, which reproduces published IME with +0.72% median difference and emission rate with +0.16% median difference, achieving 0.843 median intersection-over-union against reference masks.
Imaging spectrometers increasingly distribute source-resolved methane plume products in which the plume mask, integrated mass enhancement (IME), plume length, emission rate, and uncertainty are physically and algorithmically linked. Using 63 EMIT-derived Carbon Mapper plume records from 27 scenes, we show that these published scalar quantities do not uniquely constrain the plume boundary: substantially different yet plausible masks reproduce the same IME, plume length, and emission rate. Genetic-algorithm (GA) ensembles conditioned on the published IME and plume length make this equifinality explicit: the high-confidence core selected by nearly all target-consistent masks covers a median of 13% of the plausible footprint envelope, and ambiguity is largest for weak, low-overlap plumes. The diagnostics come from PlumeQuant, which recomputes IME, plume length, emission rate, and five-term uncertainty from distributed product components under stated conventions and evaluates four mask representations: the distributed reference mask, a transparent Carbon Mapper-informed analogue (CM-like), the GA ensemble, and optional expert edits. The CM-like mask is generated per plume without access to the reference mask or published quantities, with settings fixed once on a scene-disjoint 44-plume development split. It reproduced published IME with +0.72% median difference and emission rate with +0.16% (6.98% mean absolute), reached 0.843 median intersection-over-union against the reference masks, and matched the published uncertainty scale (median ratio 1.01). Holdout mean absolute errors were 7.6% (IME), 9.5% (length), and 6.1% (rate). These are product-level consistency diagnostics, not independent validation. They flag weak, offset, or ambiguous plumes for expert review.