Global monitoring of methane point sources using deep learning on hyperspectral radiance measurements from EMIT

) point sources are critical drivers of near-term climate forcing, safety hazards, and system-inefficiencies. Space-based imaging spectroscopy is an emerging tool for identifying emissions globally, but existing approaches largely rely on manual plume identification. Here, we present the Methane Analysis and Plume Localization with Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (MAPL-EMIT) model, an end-to-end vision transformer framework that leverages the complete radiance spectrum from the EMIT instrument to jointly retrieve methane enhancements across all pixels within a scene. This approach brings together spectral information with spatial context to significantly lower detection limits. MAPL-EMIT simultaneously supports enhancement quantification, plume delineation, and source localization, even for overlapping plumes. The model was trained on 3.6 million physics-based synthetic plumes injected into global EMIT radiance data. Synthetic evaluation confirms the model's ability to identify plumes with high recall and precision and to capture weaker plumes relative to existing matched-filter approaches. On real-world benchmarks, MAPL-EMIT captures 84% of known hand-annotated NASA EMIT-L2B plume complexes across a test set of 1,084 EMIT granules, while capturing roughly 1.5 times as many plausible plumes compared to human analysts. Further verification against coincident airborne data, top-emitting landfills, and controlled release experiments confirms the model's ability to identify previously uncaptured sources. By incorporating model-generated metrics such as spectral fit scores and estimated noise levels, the framework can limit false-positives. Overall, MAPL-EMIT enables high-throughput implementation on the full EMIT data catalog, shifting methane monitoring to a rapid, scalable paradigm for global plume mapping at the facility scale.

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2026-09-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2612145123
Primary Topic
Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Global monitoring of methane point sources using deep learning on hyperspectral radiance measurements from EMIT

Varun Gulshan, Anna M. Michalak, Andrew Thorpe, Philip G. Brodrick et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics
article

Global monitoring of methane point sources using deep learning on hyperspectral radiance measurements from EMIT

Varun Gulshan, Anna M. Michalak, Andrew Thorpe, Philip G. Brodrick, Vishal V. Batchu, Michelangelo Conserva, Christopher V. Arsdale, Alex Wilson
article en

Abstract

) point sources are critical drivers of near-term climate forcing, safety hazards, and system-inefficiencies. Space-based imaging spectroscopy is an emerging tool for identifying emissions globally, but existing approaches largely rely on manual plume identification. Here, we present the Methane Analysis and Plume Localization with Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (MAPL-EMIT) model, an end-to-end vision transformer framework that leverages the complete radiance spectrum from the EMIT instrument to jointly retrieve methane enhancements across all pixels within a scene. This approach brings together spectral information with spatial context to significantly lower detection limits. MAPL-EMIT simultaneously supports enhancement quantification, plume delineation, and source localization, even for overlapping plumes. The model was trained on 3.6 million physics-based synthetic plumes injected into global EMIT radiance data. Synthetic evaluation confirms the model's ability to identify plumes with high recall and precision and to capture weaker plumes relative to existing matched-filter approaches. On real-world benchmarks, MAPL-EMIT captures 84% of known hand-annotated NASA EMIT-L2B plume complexes across a test set of 1,084 EMIT granules, while capturing roughly 1.5 times as many plausible plumes compared to human analysts. Further verification against coincident airborne data, top-emitting landfills, and controlled release experiments confirms the model's ability to identify previously uncaptured sources. By incorporating model-generated metrics such as spectral fit scores and estimated noise levels, the framework can limit false-positives. Overall, MAPL-EMIT enables high-throughput implementation on the full EMIT data catalog, shifting methane monitoring to a rapid, scalable paradigm for global plume mapping at the facility scale.

Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesVol. 123(36)
Google (United States) (US), Jet Propulsion Laboratory (US), Carnegie Institution for Science (US)
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Climate action
Openalex Percentile: Top 66%
Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics
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