Integrating Satellite, Aircraft, and Ground-Based Observations to Improve a GHG Inventory Network

Methane (CH4) is the second-most effective greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential up to 70 times that of carbon dioxide (CO2) over the span of 25 years. With a majority of these emissions attributed to livestock, landfill, and wastewater treatment, CH4 emissions are a concern for both urban and rural landscapes. Though Earth-observing satellites can effectively monitor mid-to-upper tropospheric CH4 on a global scale, current instrumentation is limited in its capacity to accurately measure near-surface CH4 on a local scale. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) regulates stationary sources of air pollution in the nine counties surrounding San Francisco Bay. BAAQMD traditionally estimates emissions using a bottom-up approach, combining emissions factor and activity data to estimate source emissions per sector. However, recent literature suggests that these bottom-up approaches are underestimating CH4 emissions by nearly 50% in many regions of California. In efforts to address the discrepancy, this project compares BAAQMD's current CH4 spatial emissions inventory with top-down sub-Planetary Boundary Layer aircraft measurements from the NASA Alpha Jet Atmospheric eXperiment (AJAX). Together, these different approaches were used to identify CH4 hot-spots in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition, sources of high-CH4 anomalies were identified using USGS high resolution aerial imagery and trajectory analysis. Furthermore, this project used NASA Landsat 8 imagery and USGS orthoimagery to classify the types of indicated emissions and infer other points of interest not included in the current BAAQMD inventory. These findings help pinpoint specific sites for BAAQMD's upcoming Mobile GHG Measurement Network; furthermore, results from this project suggest future sites for coincident data collection between advancing bottom-up and top-down instruments.