Scouring the Skies for Methane Data

Two methane plumes near Evanston, Wyoming, observed by a NASA imaging spectrometer on the International Space Station. Photo: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio.

Reporter’s Toolbox: Scouring the Skies for Methane Data

By Joseph A. Davis

2025 was a bad year for methane data geeks. We finally had a satellite in orbit, sensing methane emissions at fine resolution and — ZAP! — the satellite went silent for reasons no one is sure of. Bummer!

But fear not, data-deprived dweebs: There is hope … and even data. Let us express our gratitude to those behind the initiative.

MethaneSAT, as it was named, did send a good bit of data back before going dark. We have that to use. And there are other satellites with other methane sensors still up there and showering data upon us. 

 

What we do have is

fairly high-resolution

and accurate data.

 

So what we do have is fairly high-resolution and accurate data, because it comes from satellite instruments.

And just a reminder: We care about methane because it causes about 20% of all global warming. And because it is often the cheapest and easiest of the greenhouse gases to control.

Where the data comes from

MethaneSAT data can be found at this portal. It also includes another dataset, called MethaneAIR, taken from airplane-borne sensors. It’s all on one map, with coverage going back several months to several years.

What Toolbox loves about MethaneSAT is that it was funded and launched by civilians and activists, namely the Environmental Defense Fund. So. Empowering. We only wish EDF had enough money to launch another one.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Environment Programme has put up another, related, methane data collection mapping website — the International Methane Emissions Observatory. Find IMEO here.

All of these databases are map-based and online.

How to use the data smartly

Knowing what to do with the data is the hard part. How small an area can your detector detect? If you find methane emissions from a gas well or refinery, you know what you’ve got. What if it’s coming from a whole area?

Popularly, many people immediately think of oil and gas production when you say methane. And yes, they do vent, leak, flare — and waste — a lot of methane. Collecting it would make money.

It turns out that a lot of the methane going into the atmosphere comes from larger or more diffuse sources: Wetlands. Landfills. Manure lagoons. Stockyards. Rice paddies. Soil. Cow farts. Ocean bottoms. Melting permafrost. Termites. We won’t go on.

 

Writing smartly about

methane depends on

knowing the source.

 

Writing smartly about methane depends on knowing the source. That inevitably means overlaying your methane emission maps with layers that can tell you more about possible sources. You can find landfills and pig farms if you try.

Another thing worth remembering is that the life of methane once it gets into the atmosphere is quite short: maybe seven years. It breaks down chemically. Carbon dioxide traps more heat because it lasts longer (hundreds or thousands of years).

As with all data-based stories, Toolbox encourages you to go to the site, talk to people and groundtruth everything you can.

[Editor’s note: For more, see our Covering Climate Solutions special report on methane as a global warming source, along with a methane and climate change toolbox and a recording of an SEJ virtual webinar, “Covering Climate Solutions: Containing and Monitoring Methane.” We’ve also got an earlier Backgrounder on methane, TipSheets on landfills leaking methane and on residential gas bans, Toolboxes about a prizewinning data reporting project on methane flaring and on tracking threats from local oil and gas wells, a recent Feature on reporting on abandoned oil and gas wells and related stories on orphan well databases, earlier cleanup funding plans and an Inside Story Q&A on dry oil wells affecting low-income communities in California. Plus, check out methane-related headlines from EJToday.]

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 11, No. 18. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.