California to hunt greenhouse gas leaks and superemitters with monitoring satellites

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https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/california-hunt-greenhouse-gas-leaks-and-super-emitters-monitoring-satellites

Source: By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. 

Excerpt: In December 2016, soon after advisers to President Donald Trump threatened to shut off NASA’s climate-observing satellites, California Governor Jerry Brown made a famous promise: “If Trump turns off the satellites,” he said while addressing a geoscience meeting, “California will launch its own damn satellites.” That promise is now a reality, with California and partners set to launch by 2023 two satellites to spot and monitor plumes of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane. If all goes right, dozens more could follow. The $100 million Carbon Mapper project, announced today and financed by private philanthropists including Michael Bloomberg, will advance efforts to track concentrated emissions of greenhouse gases, which rise from fossil fuel power plants, leaky pipelines, and abandoned wells. Previous satellites have lacked the resolution and focus to monitor point sources rigorously. “We’re going after the big emitters,” says Riley Duren, Carbon Mapper’s CEO and a remote-sensing scientist at the University of Arizona. He says the ultimate goal is to be “like the weather service for methane and CO2....  

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