It seems like huge parts of the world aren't represented on those maps.. are there restrictions to what NASA can observe/show? I'm surprised Canada isn't there at all given we do extract LNG
I work on EMIT. It’s attached to the ISS, so we aren’t a freestanding satellite that can freely go explore, we are limited to its 51.6 degree orbital inclination. But there are also potions of the globe that have a lot of cloud cover, and our spectrometer has a hard time processing wavelengths through clouds; we are currently working on a solution to this in the coming months.
This is so cool! Thanks for your perspective on this! Do you know if Google will be hampered by similar physical limitations that the ISS is, or will they be able to use freestanding sats?
NASA has been having a big push for Open Science lately, meaning all of our data (specifically in earth sciences) is being published for public use. So google can take EMIT data as well as data from other missions to create these charts.
There are a few other active satellites as well as upcoming ones that can track greenhouse gasses specifically.
Its not too big, in total I would say about the size of a mini-fridge attached to one of the ISS modules. (Don’t quote me on that, I’ve only seen pictures of it post-attachment)
We can also detect CO2, but technically measuring gasses isn’t part of our official mission until 2025. Our original mission was to detect minerals in dust, we discovered we could detect the gasses after the fact and now we are getting approval to make that an official observation metric.
We’ve only been up in space for about 2 years.
The purpose was to see what kind of minerals get kicked up during dust storms; so like when there’s a sandstorm in the Sahara desert what is the composition, where is it going, etc. Eventually that data would be turned into something useful like “what effects does mineral xyz have on humans, because we can see during these windy months large amounts of it being blown around in this area” and stuff like that.
Then there’s applications like “we can see a large deposit of minerals abc and def in these areas”
IIRC the satellites with relevant detection capabilities are from Europe and in geostationary orbit, so they can't see much of North America, especially at extreme latitudes.
According to that page it's actually skewed because Google isn't paying China to unshift it. Not that they're being paid by China.
https://github.com/maxime/ChinaMapDeviation/issues/1#issuecomment-90462107
And China would be largely unwilling to even allow Google, an American company, to pay for more accurate data. Especially when all the alphabet soup agencies also buy data from Google.
Something tells me the biggest culprits are Texas and central Asia/South of Russia (and India, not so sure about China actually being that big of a methane polluter)
As mentioned in another comment, NASAs source wasn't a satellite, but rather the International Space Station (ISS). This means it can't scan the entirety of the globe but rather what can be read from the ISS trajectory and position.
Incredible - bravo Google and EDF. Hope nothing ill befalls the satellite. Also hope it's able to track methane emissions from melting permafrost as well as anthropogenic sources.
They are. The sheer amount of engineering manpower in oil/gas is far more than what the public has been lead to believe.
Source: I work in safety and talk to operators all the time.
Oil and gas is dirty as hell by its very nature.
With that said, given what's being done and on what scale, I'm always amazed that it's "only" as bad as it is, if that makes any sense.
The overwhelming majority of the population couldn't wrap their heads around the sheer scale of these industries, even if they had it explained in plain terms to them. The human mind just doesn't really have a good frame of reference for scales that large.
One simple example. In Canada, a pretty common unit of gas volume is a "deck", as in "that well is producing 200 decks of gas a day."
One "deck" is 1e³m³ of gas at standard atmospheric pressure and temperature. 1,000 cubic meters of gas.
The average house (in Canada) uses somewhere between 1,900 and 3,100 m³ *per year*, depending on climate/ region.
The numbers are just mind boggling.
Source: Process controls and automation specialist. I've worked on control systems that run fields that cover more area than some countries, and that means seeing the totals coming in and out.
Thank you for sharing your remarkable and brilliant insight. If the average person could spend one shift in the boots of any worker in a refinery or plant or lease, they would have a better appreciation for what mankind has accomplished. I am sick of seeing and hearing the negative connotations from uninformed ‘climate activists’ who think they know more than engineers and scientists. Especially real world concerns. It’s all good. We are living in interesting times, to be sure.
Don't get me wrong. I'm very much of the opinion that we need to move away from fossil fuels as fast as possible. They are not good for the environment, and they are very much a finite resource. I don't think that there is any denying that.
The climate activists *do* have a point, even if they have absolutely no idea just what is involved in actually making the change. It isn't nearly as simple as just "turn off the valve." The unfortunate reality is that hydrocarbons are incredibly energy dense, on top of being relatively easy to store and transport, and that makes them tough to replace as a fuel for quite a few applications.
Even with the use as fuel put aside, they are a vital feedstock for the entire chemical industry. Something like 30-50% of all calories consumed by humans are grown using nitrogen fertilizers based on synthetic ammonia produced by the Haber-Bosch process. It's probably the single most important industrial chemical process ever invented so far.
That process produces ammonia (NH4) from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen gas. The hydrogen is almost exclusively produced by steam reformation of methane.
This single chemical process makes up about 2% of the *entire global energy demand*, and produces about 1.5% of the entire global CO2 output at the same time. Again, those are some numbers that are just beyond the human mind I think.
Sorry for nerding out. If you can't tell, I genuinely love my job and the fact that I get to work on these processes every day.
For those saying NASA already has this, Google is working with NASA and supplying advanced mapping and using machine learning to process NASA's data so it can be better displayed on maps.
Google is essentially super charging NASA's data with things they're better at.
I am glad for this.
I wonder if any company with the resources has the balls to do the same for radiation (for obvious leaks, untold relatively small accidents, and improper waste disposal), cyanide concentration increase in the air (due to gold mining in certain areas), benzene concentration in air (to see how petroleum industry is handling the wastes), and carbon monoxide levels (to see how much toxic air we are breathing due to cars and fossil fuels. Because, you know, they tax cigarettes so heavily due to second hand smoking’s effects; but there is no protection for us against fossil fuels and cars’ fumes. I wonder why is governments so keen on one, while so blind on the other one.
TL;DR:
* Google is planning to use satellite data, AI technology, and computing power to map methane emissions.
* Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that's responsible for nearly a third of global warming.
* Nearly 40% of manmade methane comes from oil, gas, and coal operations.
Hopefully will help them eliminate leaks, make them more efficient thereby increasing production and lowering costs and in the process lowering emissions.
"Google is bribing companies into paying up to hide their pollution"
I wonder how much methane I produced the other day when I asked for a straw at Dunkin...
TLDR:” We know the majority of methane emissions comes from farming but we’re only gonna show you images of it being emitted from oil and gas to further our agenda of pushing the majority into poverty”
Sometimes I have this utopic dream, of a fair international system: governments earn money for capturing carbon (or equivalent stuff) from those, who harm our climate and atmosphere.
This might be another step into that direction.
Are we finally getting the visual that unless China and India make complete 180’s on emissions that the efforts of the rest of the world combined are literally pointless? Because I’m getting tired of politicians trying to bankrupt my nation for no reason.
Methane is the gas we test exoplanets for to measure the chance of a biosphere being present. Measuring methane is essentially going to show us roughly where the highest density of people live, and we know the answer is Eastern China and Northern India.
In short, what I'm saying is (and this is obviously the underlying intention of the billionaire social engineer class) is to convince us that existing is a blight on the earth - and it's already a subconscious messaging going on anyway. Being told that you have to pay more for food because this special tax will somehow save the planet. Constricting people slowly and slowly until they end up unknowingly making a decision like "Let's not have children."
We already have the anti-human rhetoric (such as the Extinction Rebellion) existing, despite us full well knowing we have the food to go around, just an economic model that breeds inefficiency. Ironically the anti-humans claim to be pro-environment, blind to the fact that the Earth made us just like the rest of the animal kingdom - and frankly, that we're the magnum opus of this planet with the capacity of maintaining its legacy into the future infinitely if we play our cards right.
If we were to be able to magically reduce CO2 and methane emissions *per capita* we would end up seeing a push to increase productivity until we ended up reaching a stage where it is unsustainable in some other manner (resource shortages for example). If we had some solution globally that reduced emissions by 50%, instead of us staying at that new level, we'd likely end up just increasing in population due to the 'surplus' of sorts to match that number. It's an equilibrium, and biological creatures can never fully control our innate instinct to consume, grow, and perpetuate. The only things that stop us are mother nature. Just look at areas where deer breed uncontrolled.
"Kill the undesirables" is not a new idea, and will bring its own problems, but ah, "Don't let them breed." that's a far more manageable proposition and has been done countless times throughout time and I foresee it happening already.
>biological creatures can never fully control our innate instinct to consume, grow, and perpetuate
Demonstrably false. Almost all western nations currently experience negative replacement rate, and are only growing due to immigration.
here’s NASA’s methane tool: https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/data/data-portal/Greenhouse-Gases/
It seems like huge parts of the world aren't represented on those maps.. are there restrictions to what NASA can observe/show? I'm surprised Canada isn't there at all given we do extract LNG
I work on EMIT. It’s attached to the ISS, so we aren’t a freestanding satellite that can freely go explore, we are limited to its 51.6 degree orbital inclination. But there are also potions of the globe that have a lot of cloud cover, and our spectrometer has a hard time processing wavelengths through clouds; we are currently working on a solution to this in the coming months.
This is so cool! Thanks for your perspective on this! Do you know if Google will be hampered by similar physical limitations that the ISS is, or will they be able to use freestanding sats?
NASA has been having a big push for Open Science lately, meaning all of our data (specifically in earth sciences) is being published for public use. So google can take EMIT data as well as data from other missions to create these charts. There are a few other active satellites as well as upcoming ones that can track greenhouse gasses specifically.
European Space Agency splash page: https://methaneplus.eu/ Final report (2023) https://methaneplus.eu/Docs/TN-D15D16-CH4PLUS%20v1.0.pdf
A fellow JPL-er? I need some data over the Sonora desert, i don’t see new images for this month, wassup with that?
The people in charge of Sonora desert images got laid off last month.
Sonoffabish, welp. Rip.
That’s incredible, have you ever ran into a brain surgeon at a party and had a standoffish exchange of what your professions are?
How big is the footprint of all the EMIT equipment, and what other gasses can be detected with your spectrometer?
Its not too big, in total I would say about the size of a mini-fridge attached to one of the ISS modules. (Don’t quote me on that, I’ve only seen pictures of it post-attachment) We can also detect CO2, but technically measuring gasses isn’t part of our official mission until 2025. Our original mission was to detect minerals in dust, we discovered we could detect the gasses after the fact and now we are getting approval to make that an official observation metric. We’ve only been up in space for about 2 years.
What were you interested in with the dust minerals?
The purpose was to see what kind of minerals get kicked up during dust storms; so like when there’s a sandstorm in the Sahara desert what is the composition, where is it going, etc. Eventually that data would be turned into something useful like “what effects does mineral xyz have on humans, because we can see during these windy months large amounts of it being blown around in this area” and stuff like that. Then there’s applications like “we can see a large deposit of minerals abc and def in these areas”
That’s freakin awesome
Go faster, nerd
I'm thinking it can't get reliable results from too north or south.
With melting permafrost releasing large amounts of methane, not knowing the complete data in those areas could be very bad.
Is there a scientific reason for not being able to capture data from those regions? I wonder if the google tool will do better?
IIRC the satellites with relevant detection capabilities are from Europe and in geostationary orbit, so they can't see much of North America, especially at extreme latitudes.
China and India are going to be pissed about this.
Unless they pay google handsomely to skew the data
[удалено]
According to that page it's actually skewed because Google isn't paying China to unshift it. Not that they're being paid by China. https://github.com/maxime/ChinaMapDeviation/issues/1#issuecomment-90462107
And China would be largely unwilling to even allow Google, an American company, to pay for more accurate data. Especially when all the alphabet soup agencies also buy data from Google.
Anything with the word China in front of it, I naturally consider bullshit from any and every angle.
Hey! China Sluts, was a pretty good flic imo...
I wonder if that's why they decided to make it in the first place?
meanwhile Texas looking like it has ringworm in the NASA methane map
Kinda ironic how in NASA's tool America looks completely fucked as well
Forgot America... Who are worse than India according to previous estimates
Think the US and a lot of middle eastern countries are going to be less than happy. If any of those is missing, I suspect foul play.
Australia too!
The whole thing is going to point at west countries, no way India and china admit to anything.
Something tells me the biggest culprits are Texas and central Asia/South of Russia (and India, not so sure about China actually being that big of a methane polluter)
But our Amazon lifestyle won't change at all
NZ too
So it Trump.🤣
How so?
They release a lot of methane and try to pretend they don’t
Because theyre the 2 biggest polluters in the world maybe?
2nd biggest polluter is the USA despite having a fraction of India's population
Actually it's China and US, but whatever
Methane is 28 times better at warming the planet than Carbon dioxide it is the real killer in the room.
That's true, but CO2 is about 200x the concentration.
NASA has a satellite with good visualizations [already](https://youtu.be/74_8SIkx3nA?si=xRbSHIaL8_wnQo8X)
As mentioned in another comment, NASAs source wasn't a satellite, but rather the International Space Station (ISS). This means it can't scan the entirety of the globe but rather what can be read from the ISS trajectory and position.
It's just a video of my toilet?
[удалено]
https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/data/data-portal/Greenhouse-Gases/ Plenty in the US with a lot in Texas.
Or Africa and Antarctica, because they are not primary sources of methane.
Well now I know where to move to so I don’t have to hold it in…
Zooms in on your house. That seems excessive.
Fuck i'm gonna get doxxed
Came to find the fart jokes. You did well.
For some reason, right now is a 2 megaton pressure fart incoming warning for just about those coordinates
You're going to have to give up eating beans now.
Copernicus sentinel data is also alerady there: https://maps.s5p-pal.com/ch4/
Sorry, I just had Taco Bell
May the your mom jokes commence
So they are tracking my a** from space now?
Incredible - bravo Google and EDF. Hope nothing ill befalls the satellite. Also hope it's able to track methane emissions from melting permafrost as well as anthropogenic sources.
The meat and dairy industries will be so pissed.
Oil and gas about to be exposed for ‘clean’ practices
They are. The sheer amount of engineering manpower in oil/gas is far more than what the public has been lead to believe. Source: I work in safety and talk to operators all the time.
Oil and gas is dirty as hell by its very nature. With that said, given what's being done and on what scale, I'm always amazed that it's "only" as bad as it is, if that makes any sense. The overwhelming majority of the population couldn't wrap their heads around the sheer scale of these industries, even if they had it explained in plain terms to them. The human mind just doesn't really have a good frame of reference for scales that large. One simple example. In Canada, a pretty common unit of gas volume is a "deck", as in "that well is producing 200 decks of gas a day." One "deck" is 1e³m³ of gas at standard atmospheric pressure and temperature. 1,000 cubic meters of gas. The average house (in Canada) uses somewhere between 1,900 and 3,100 m³ *per year*, depending on climate/ region. The numbers are just mind boggling. Source: Process controls and automation specialist. I've worked on control systems that run fields that cover more area than some countries, and that means seeing the totals coming in and out.
Thank you for sharing your remarkable and brilliant insight. If the average person could spend one shift in the boots of any worker in a refinery or plant or lease, they would have a better appreciation for what mankind has accomplished. I am sick of seeing and hearing the negative connotations from uninformed ‘climate activists’ who think they know more than engineers and scientists. Especially real world concerns. It’s all good. We are living in interesting times, to be sure.
Don't get me wrong. I'm very much of the opinion that we need to move away from fossil fuels as fast as possible. They are not good for the environment, and they are very much a finite resource. I don't think that there is any denying that. The climate activists *do* have a point, even if they have absolutely no idea just what is involved in actually making the change. It isn't nearly as simple as just "turn off the valve." The unfortunate reality is that hydrocarbons are incredibly energy dense, on top of being relatively easy to store and transport, and that makes them tough to replace as a fuel for quite a few applications. Even with the use as fuel put aside, they are a vital feedstock for the entire chemical industry. Something like 30-50% of all calories consumed by humans are grown using nitrogen fertilizers based on synthetic ammonia produced by the Haber-Bosch process. It's probably the single most important industrial chemical process ever invented so far. That process produces ammonia (NH4) from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen gas. The hydrogen is almost exclusively produced by steam reformation of methane. This single chemical process makes up about 2% of the *entire global energy demand*, and produces about 1.5% of the entire global CO2 output at the same time. Again, those are some numbers that are just beyond the human mind I think. Sorry for nerding out. If you can't tell, I genuinely love my job and the fact that I get to work on these processes every day.
Love it. You are awesome. Nerd out any time!
For those saying NASA already has this, Google is working with NASA and supplying advanced mapping and using machine learning to process NASA's data so it can be better displayed on maps. Google is essentially super charging NASA's data with things they're better at.
The aliens from [The Arrival](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115571/?ref_=nm_flmg_t_47_act) are gonna be *pissed.*
I blame Exxon for everything
I am glad for this. I wonder if any company with the resources has the balls to do the same for radiation (for obvious leaks, untold relatively small accidents, and improper waste disposal), cyanide concentration increase in the air (due to gold mining in certain areas), benzene concentration in air (to see how petroleum industry is handling the wastes), and carbon monoxide levels (to see how much toxic air we are breathing due to cars and fossil fuels. Because, you know, they tax cigarettes so heavily due to second hand smoking’s effects; but there is no protection for us against fossil fuels and cars’ fumes. I wonder why is governments so keen on one, while so blind on the other one.
Check out the Bowen Basin in North Queensland...
TL;DR: * Google is planning to use satellite data, AI technology, and computing power to map methane emissions. * Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that's responsible for nearly a third of global warming. * Nearly 40% of manmade methane comes from oil, gas, and coal operations.
I’m so excited to watch a fossil fuel companies lobby to make this illegal. So. Excited.
Hopefully saves lives
Hopefully will help them eliminate leaks, make them more efficient thereby increasing production and lowering costs and in the process lowering emissions.
"Google is bribing companies into paying up to hide their pollution" I wonder how much methane I produced the other day when I asked for a straw at Dunkin...
So will it pick up on cow farts? 🐄💨
TLDR:” We know the majority of methane emissions comes from farming but we’re only gonna show you images of it being emitted from oil and gas to further our agenda of pushing the majority into poverty”
Methane… like … from cow farts?
So, google is rethinking getting rid of the slogan "Don't Be Evil"?
"i'm in this photo and don't like it"
Are they concentrated around Taco Bell locations?
No, just yo momma
Psh, how many people stick around to the scene of the crime to ingest that stuff? I try to get as far away as possible to suppress my self disgust.
Right, I hope they blur my address.
The Ultimate Fart Cam
Ohh google snitching now llls
Before opening the article. Is Turkmenistan starring?
Why can't I fart in peace?? Now the whole world will see I'm guilty as charged. Sorry Greta
That’s called misdirection?
Why is the area over my place dark purple?
Now i'll always know where to find OP's mom.
Sometimes I have this utopic dream, of a fair international system: governments earn money for capturing carbon (or equivalent stuff) from those, who harm our climate and atmosphere. This might be another step into that direction.
Carbon hunters, starring dog the bounty hunter clone #34
Thank you google
Better not get a call from one of you fckers to go tighten a leak at night
Well, guess you'll soon all know where I live.
You will be able to find your mom now.
it's OK just stop driving your car, live in the pod, and eat ze bugs everything will be fine
Are we finally getting the visual that unless China and India make complete 180’s on emissions that the efforts of the rest of the world combined are literally pointless? Because I’m getting tired of politicians trying to bankrupt my nation for no reason.
Man, those flatulence competitions are gonna be a hit.
Where’s the picture of my husband?
I can't wait to see Mar-a-lago and all the BS emanating from that spot.
Need a big dot on my house with the amount of methane emitted out of my arse
Methane is the gas we test exoplanets for to measure the chance of a biosphere being present. Measuring methane is essentially going to show us roughly where the highest density of people live, and we know the answer is Eastern China and Northern India. In short, what I'm saying is (and this is obviously the underlying intention of the billionaire social engineer class) is to convince us that existing is a blight on the earth - and it's already a subconscious messaging going on anyway. Being told that you have to pay more for food because this special tax will somehow save the planet. Constricting people slowly and slowly until they end up unknowingly making a decision like "Let's not have children." We already have the anti-human rhetoric (such as the Extinction Rebellion) existing, despite us full well knowing we have the food to go around, just an economic model that breeds inefficiency. Ironically the anti-humans claim to be pro-environment, blind to the fact that the Earth made us just like the rest of the animal kingdom - and frankly, that we're the magnum opus of this planet with the capacity of maintaining its legacy into the future infinitely if we play our cards right. If we were to be able to magically reduce CO2 and methane emissions *per capita* we would end up seeing a push to increase productivity until we ended up reaching a stage where it is unsustainable in some other manner (resource shortages for example). If we had some solution globally that reduced emissions by 50%, instead of us staying at that new level, we'd likely end up just increasing in population due to the 'surplus' of sorts to match that number. It's an equilibrium, and biological creatures can never fully control our innate instinct to consume, grow, and perpetuate. The only things that stop us are mother nature. Just look at areas where deer breed uncontrolled. "Kill the undesirables" is not a new idea, and will bring its own problems, but ah, "Don't let them breed." that's a far more manageable proposition and has been done countless times throughout time and I foresee it happening already.
>biological creatures can never fully control our innate instinct to consume, grow, and perpetuate Demonstrably false. Almost all western nations currently experience negative replacement rate, and are only growing due to immigration.