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Comment by tito | Hacker News Reader

Emissions monitoring is a really interesting technology challenge. So much of it is self-reported, which means a crapshoot. Remote monitoring seems more reliable but less accurate perhaps. The highest resolution monitoring tech I know of is NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory2.

Has anyone here studied the Orbiting Carbon Observatory? I'm curious for more details and how it might help here.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco2/index.html

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I've been working on a project lately to explore geenhouse gas cameras. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-build-a-co2-video-camera

I have hope that the thermopile array tech we've been seeing lately might make gas monitoring more readily available. It likely will still require cryo-cooling though.

Really interesting idea! I'm not very knowledgeable around greenhouse gases, and even less around the various industrial processes that release them. Would cameras like this be able to give us the amount of CO2 released in say, metric tons? Or would it be too hard to actually get precise measurements and this is better for comparing orders of magnitude?

Have you seen this new satellite that will be going up https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49799760

See the comments at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21183793, they address your question about satellite monitoring of CH4.

The OCO-2 spectral bands were chosen for H2O and for CO2. I don’t think they provide methane information. A successor mission concept, GeoCARB, can get methane as well: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/geocarb-a-new-view-of-carbo...

Meanwhile, there are in situ methane monitors, and in some areas, spectroscopic observations (ground based) that allow methane source localization. For very new results for the LA area, see: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018..., pdf at https://authors.library.caltech.edu/96023/1/2018JD030062.pdf

It is a very cool science/technical problem, with high potential payoff for identifying big sources.

In a similar vein, Planet Labs' satellites can count Earth's trees every day. Monitoring methane and carbon dioxide is a different beast, but still, remote monitoring FTW. https://www.planet.com/pulse/developing-the-worlds-first-ind...

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