MethaneS2CM: A Dataset for Multispectral Deep Methane Emission Detection

The detection of methane emissions has drawn significant attention from researchers, as methane is one of the main contributors to global warming. Due to their high accessibility and extensive coverage, satellite-based remote sensing data have become a widely used tool for studying methane emissions. The multispectral satellite Sentinel-2 is particularly prominent for studies related to methane, as it provides shortwave infrared (SWIR) spectral band data that align with the methane absorption line. Previous studies on methane emission detection using Sentinel-2 data rely mainly on synthetic data, which involves simulated methane emission plumes overlaid on real Sentinel-2 backgrounds. However, our analysis reveals that Sentinel-2 images with simulated plumes exhibit different data distributions and visual characteristics from those of real-world data. Moreover, these studies typically use only a single reference image as a clean background along with the plume image, which we find to be insufficient. Finally, the lack of publicly available benchmarks hinders research and development in this domain. To address these challenges, we introduce the MethaneS2CM dataset for methane emission detection, collected from Sentinel-2 multispectral data and the CarbonMapper platform. Our dataset consists of two main products (L1C and L2A) of Sentinel-2, including over 4000 plumes from 43 countries, ranging from 2016 to 2024. The dataset incorporates both long-term and short-term variations in Sentinel-2 images, with each sample consisting of images captured at different time periods. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate a wide range of existing methane emission detection methods and models based on this dataset. We subsequently propose a deep methane emission classification model, MEECNet. Experimental results demonstrate that MEECNet outperforms all baseline methods. Our dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/H1deaki/MethaneS2CM.