Hacker News Reader

Better realtime data may improve actionability, and the big audience reach may influence the overall narrative. Independent measurements are extremely important to have for science and data validation. But monitoring methane has been going on for a few years. NASA even has a portal:

https://methane.jpl.nasa.gov

https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...

View on HN

Yes, NASA (JPL) did some of the original work on remote-sensing measurements of methane emitters.

The bulk of the methane emission events displayed on the (excellent) portal you linked come from EMIT, an imaging spectrometer on ISS.

EMIT was made to map ground mineral composition for climate studies, but it does gather a visible-to-IR spectrum across the mid-latitudes at a 60m resolution. This spectrum bears the imprint of any atmospheric methane, allowing them to back out a CH4 concentration from the spectrum as a side product separate from the original mineral-mapping goals.

(Some history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33427748)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com